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Everything Bad is Good for You
clampe writes "
In Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson tries to convince the reader that video games, television and the Internet are good for us, despite critics who talk about "vast Wastelands" and "infantilized societies". The book raises interesting questions, but in the end is a lightweight analysis that is better for engendering sound bites on NPR and The Daily Show than for convincing serious readers." Read on for Clampes' review.
Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter
author
Steven Johnson
pages
238
publisher
Riverhead Books
rating
7
reviewer
clampe
ISBN
1-57322-307-7
summary
Popular culture may have a role in making people smarter
In "Everything Bad Is Good For You" Johnson argues that major forms of entertainment like television, video games, films and the Internet have grown increasingly complex over the past several decades, which corresponds to an increase in average IQ scores in the U.S.
The introduction to the book summarizes cultural criticisms about the growing banality of entertainment, focusing mostly on television. Johnson uses this springboard to state his thesis: that popular culture is not only growing more complex, but that the complexity is making consumers of pop culture more intelligent.
The main content of the book is divided into two main parts, with the first arguing that video games, television, the Internet and movies have grown more complex in recent years, and the second part outlining the relationship between those forms of entertainment and increased intelligence.
Johnson claims that the complexity of problem solving and exploration involved in current video games help players learn critical thinking skills. He amusingly asks the readers to consider a world where video games have been around for centuries and a new technology called the book is all the rage. The cultural critics currently bagging on video games would claim books are static, isolating and understimulating. Johnson is the first to admit he's usng hyperbole here, and books obviously have value, but the point is made. Video games, he points out, cannot be directly compared to books in terms of the types of intelligence they encourage. Video games, according to Johnson, are valuable because they force players to make choices, solve problems, keep track of varied situations and in some cases cooperate with others.
Criticizing television is a popular straw man activity for cultural critics. The boob-tube, the idiot box, the vast wasteland. Johnson argues that while the general thinking is TV has gotten worse over the past 30 years, it in fact has become much better. Current shows have more complex narratives, trust viewers to catch subtle references and have denser social networks. Johnson compares "Dragnet" to "Starsky and Hutch" to "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos" to show the evolving complexity of narratives in television dramas. Even reality TV, the easiest target around, is more complex compared to it's historical antecedent, the game show.
The Internet is valuable in three ways according to Johnson: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces and by creating new channels for social interaction. Johnson provides a laundry list of online interactions that bring people together and make them smarter.
Johnson gives a "qualified yes" to the proposition that movies have undergone the same transformation as television. His main evidence is the increase in the number of characters to be found in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy compared to the original "Star Wars" trilogy. The other main evidence is the development of a sub-genre of films he calls "mind-benders" typified by Kaufman works like "Being John Malkovich".
In Part 2 of the book, Johnson associates research that shows American IQ scores have risen over the past several decades (the Flynn Effect) with the increased complexity of popular culture. He looks at alternative explanations for this trend, such as nutrition and education, dismissing each in favor of the popular culture explanation.
The Good:
There is something about people who say they never watch TV that makes me want to punch them. I'm also a little tired of having to explain at dinner parties and family gatherings that my playing video games does not mean I went ahead with the lobotomy. Johnson seems to have tapped into a real feeling that television and games are not the worthless pastimes that popular media decries them as. The book raises interesting and important questions, while providing a tonic against cultural nay-sayers.
As in previous works like Emergence, Johnson has an engaging and approachable writing style. He blends personal experience and decent explanations of the literature to craft his arguments in an engaging manner.
The Bad:
The main problem with this book is the strength of the claims made in Part 2. Human intelligence is a complex mechanism affected by a blend of genetic and environmental factors. It is possible that games and television play a role in positively affecting intelligence, but Johnson has not strongly made that case here. The data he presents, while intriguing, are correlational at best and arbitrary at worst. Johnson is actually careful to qualify the populations he considers to be affected by popular culture, and the kinds of intelligence he is talking about. However, the arguments still hang together on fragile strings of "It could be" and "it's not like because of this".
For example, it could be that his selection of television shows to compare biases his analysis. What Johnson says about the increased complexity of television narratives seems intuitively true, but there's danger in the kind of analysis where shows are plucked with no clear selection mechanism from the past and we draw such sweeping conclusions from them.
There are also several alternative explanations to the trends pointed out in this book. For example, let's assume that there is more worthwhile television than there used to be. However, the real comparison should be between worthwhile television compared over the total amount of television available. Given the explosion of television programming since Starsky and Hutch, it's not surprising that better shows are available. Another explanation might be the maturation of the media. Literature is the gold standard here to some extent, but the novel is an older media form that has had many opportunities to attract good authors than television and video games. Over the centuries that we've had novels, we accumulated some talented authors, and those luminaries attract other talented individuals. Television and video games are a newer media, and consequently haven't accumulated as many giants. Some of Johnson's examples of the new complexity in television and film are really examples of a couple of special individuals, like Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman, attracted to an increasingly mature art form.
The above counter-examples show some of the dangers of this case based argumentation at the center of this book. By using pseudo-case studies, there isn't really a basis by which the data presented by Johnson is stronger than "because I said so." Work that would help his argument has been done in communication studies, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology, but those fields are largely ignored here. Instead, cranky old guys like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are set up as straw men. This disconnect reminds of how well Howard Rheingold incorporates current research into popular press efforts like this book. Johnson does use some decent resources like James Paul Gee, and seems to be widely read in several cogent fields, but it doesn't seem reflected as well as might be expected in the actual text.
The sections on the Internet and movies are clumsy and seem almost to be afterthoughts to the other sections. The section on video games is stronger, and the book would have been better by concentrating on that element of the story alone. May not have had as cool a title though.
Final recommendation:
This book is fun, light reading. It's not bad as a catalyst for discussion at parties, but as a serious polemic argument it doesn't hold up. Still, the book is a good airplane read, or something for the hammock. But you're better off playing a video game."
You can purchase Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
In "Everything Bad Is Good For You" Johnson argues that major forms of entertainment like television, video games, films and the Internet have grown increasingly complex over the past several decades, which corresponds to an increase in average IQ scores in the U.S.
The introduction to the book summarizes cultural criticisms about the growing banality of entertainment, focusing mostly on television. Johnson uses this springboard to state his thesis: that popular culture is not only growing more complex, but that the complexity is making consumers of pop culture more intelligent.
The main content of the book is divided into two main parts, with the first arguing that video games, television, the Internet and movies have grown more complex in recent years, and the second part outlining the relationship between those forms of entertainment and increased intelligence.
Johnson claims that the complexity of problem solving and exploration involved in current video games help players learn critical thinking skills. He amusingly asks the readers to consider a world where video games have been around for centuries and a new technology called the book is all the rage. The cultural critics currently bagging on video games would claim books are static, isolating and understimulating. Johnson is the first to admit he's usng hyperbole here, and books obviously have value, but the point is made. Video games, he points out, cannot be directly compared to books in terms of the types of intelligence they encourage. Video games, according to Johnson, are valuable because they force players to make choices, solve problems, keep track of varied situations and in some cases cooperate with others.
Criticizing television is a popular straw man activity for cultural critics. The boob-tube, the idiot box, the vast wasteland. Johnson argues that while the general thinking is TV has gotten worse over the past 30 years, it in fact has become much better. Current shows have more complex narratives, trust viewers to catch subtle references and have denser social networks. Johnson compares "Dragnet" to "Starsky and Hutch" to "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos" to show the evolving complexity of narratives in television dramas. Even reality TV, the easiest target around, is more complex compared to it's historical antecedent, the game show.
The Internet is valuable in three ways according to Johnson: by virtue of being participatory, by forcing users to learn new interfaces and by creating new channels for social interaction. Johnson provides a laundry list of online interactions that bring people together and make them smarter.
Johnson gives a "qualified yes" to the proposition that movies have undergone the same transformation as television. His main evidence is the increase in the number of characters to be found in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy compared to the original "Star Wars" trilogy. The other main evidence is the development of a sub-genre of films he calls "mind-benders" typified by Kaufman works like "Being John Malkovich".
In Part 2 of the book, Johnson associates research that shows American IQ scores have risen over the past several decades (the Flynn Effect) with the increased complexity of popular culture. He looks at alternative explanations for this trend, such as nutrition and education, dismissing each in favor of the popular culture explanation.
The Good:
There is something about people who say they never watch TV that makes me want to punch them. I'm also a little tired of having to explain at dinner parties and family gatherings that my playing video games does not mean I went ahead with the lobotomy. Johnson seems to have tapped into a real feeling that television and games are not the worthless pastimes that popular media decries them as. The book raises interesting and important questions, while providing a tonic against cultural nay-sayers.
As in previous works like Emergence, Johnson has an engaging and approachable writing style. He blends personal experience and decent explanations of the literature to craft his arguments in an engaging manner.
The Bad:
The main problem with this book is the strength of the claims made in Part 2. Human intelligence is a complex mechanism affected by a blend of genetic and environmental factors. It is possible that games and television play a role in positively affecting intelligence, but Johnson has not strongly made that case here. The data he presents, while intriguing, are correlational at best and arbitrary at worst. Johnson is actually careful to qualify the populations he considers to be affected by popular culture, and the kinds of intelligence he is talking about. However, the arguments still hang together on fragile strings of "It could be" and "it's not like because of this".
For example, it could be that his selection of television shows to compare biases his analysis. What Johnson says about the increased complexity of television narratives seems intuitively true, but there's danger in the kind of analysis where shows are plucked with no clear selection mechanism from the past and we draw such sweeping conclusions from them.
There are also several alternative explanations to the trends pointed out in this book. For example, let's assume that there is more worthwhile television than there used to be. However, the real comparison should be between worthwhile television compared over the total amount of television available. Given the explosion of television programming since Starsky and Hutch, it's not surprising that better shows are available. Another explanation might be the maturation of the media. Literature is the gold standard here to some extent, but the novel is an older media form that has had many opportunities to attract good authors than television and video games. Over the centuries that we've had novels, we accumulated some talented authors, and those luminaries attract other talented individuals. Television and video games are a newer media, and consequently haven't accumulated as many giants. Some of Johnson's examples of the new complexity in television and film are really examples of a couple of special individuals, like Aaron Sorkin and Charlie Kaufman, attracted to an increasingly mature art form.
The above counter-examples show some of the dangers of this case based argumentation at the center of this book. By using pseudo-case studies, there isn't really a basis by which the data presented by Johnson is stronger than "because I said so." Work that would help his argument has been done in communication studies, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology, but those fields are largely ignored here. Instead, cranky old guys like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman are set up as straw men. This disconnect reminds of how well Howard Rheingold incorporates current research into popular press efforts like this book. Johnson does use some decent resources like James Paul Gee, and seems to be widely read in several cogent fields, but it doesn't seem reflected as well as might be expected in the actual text.
The sections on the Internet and movies are clumsy and seem almost to be afterthoughts to the other sections. The section on video games is stronger, and the book would have been better by concentrating on that element of the story alone. May not have had as cool a title though.
Final recommendation:
This book is fun, light reading. It's not bad as a catalyst for discussion at parties, but as a serious polemic argument it doesn't hold up. Still, the book is a good airplane read, or something for the hammock. But you're better off playing a video game."
You can purchase Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Let us start with basic of all knowledgde: language. You can not convince me that youngster are becoming more articulate in their language. In the Netherlands we have this huge language problem: kids are becoming less skillful in language because of the lack using it properly. I think chatting, watching and reading street talks aren't making things more easy.
Let's face it. Benny Hill and Love American Style are poor second choices to House, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and Seinfeld. All of the latter require more sophistication from the watcher instead of pure... whatever it was that Love American Style thought was funny.
Okay so suppose television and videogames raise the IQ of people of low or average intelligence. Without tv or videogames there is nothing to replace this kind of 'education', so these people would of gone without the benefit of this mental stimulation.
You would be hard pressed to convince me that if a learned person replaced their intellectual persuits with television their IQ would go up.
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Those people seem not to understand that the clichedness of bragging about not watching television outweighs any positive impression it makes.
Anyway. Not having read the book, but as I understand it from the review -- it seems perhaps unfair to criticize it for not reaching statistically meaningful conclusions. If the argument it's challenging is "Television is moronic and for morons and that's why everyone nowadays is a moron!", it seems like a reasonable counterargument. And it's not like said argument isn't made routinely.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Does the book hold water. You speak of light reads, and I've read such books where if you don't want to think about it it makes sense. But as you apply the theory it falls apart. Is that what you are bringing up here, or are you saying more that the book doesn't go indepth enough but leaves the reader with a new perspective that is at least decently thought out to the point where if you bring it up, it can't be just torn down in a minute (by a thinking person of course, a zealot will try to tear down even the most obvious truthes in the world)?
It sounds like an interesting read, but I read enough fiction.
There is something about people who say they never watch TV that makes me want to punch them.
That's funny, because there is something about people who talk incessantly about The Apprentice and Desperate Housewives that makes me want to punch them. Sorry, but not watching television is as valid a choice as spending your life watching fake people do fake things and getting lobotomized by car ads and "reality" programming.
How is this a "problem?" Kids are changing the language, yet still seem able to communicate sufficiently with each other. Sounds like an optimization to me. Perhaps you meant to add "...and get those dang varmints off mah lawn!" too?
"video games, television and the Internet are good for us".
In the first place, I didn't know videogames (tetris, pacman, Grand Tourismo), Television (Junkyard wars, animal showdown, Wolf's Rain), and the Internet (wikipedia) were bad for us.
And I can't think of ANYONE (except extreme fundamentalists) who thinks that ALL videogames, ALL Television and ALL the internet are bad for us.
"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
Albert Einstein
I tend to agree with this poem:
We are all blind until we see
That in the human plan
Nothing is worth the making
If it does not make the man
Why build these cities glorious
If man unbuilded goes
In vain we build these cities
Unless the builder also grows.
And of course:
"To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
Theodore Roosevelt
Our society is plagued with menaces, and I highly doubt that will change, except to increase. If it ever does change it will start at home with better parenting and at church (yeah, yeah, don't even start).
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Language is primarily a functional thing. Things like contractions evolve to make communication more efficient. Although in formal English, contractions are still discouraged today. Just because kids are using netspeak doesn't mean they're any stupider than I am for using contractions in this post. To them it's normal and speeds communication. Language is not a perfect measure of intelligence.
I agree. Every generation complains about its descendant's poor language skills. This is an example of linguistic evolution, however, the perceived "lower class" languages always evolve at a faster rate than "higher class" language. This is because the "higher class" is always aiming at social mobility, where language is, in effect, inbred, and therefore more resistant to change.
As for the book, it seems like an overly simply argument. You can't just go around denying common sense to make interesting conversation. There must be some thought behind it. The title looks like a grab for sales.
Yes, total TV crap is up by a factor of 50X and the crap-to-quality factor is worse by a factor of 10, but that still means we have 5X the available hours of quality programming compared to 30 years ago.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
But your moral IQ has taken a big hit. Bitches? You mean people like your mom? Your sister? Your aunt? Your grandmother? You ought to take a long look at your misogyny and misanthropy. You may think it's just a game but the longer you entertain such thoughts the more likely you are to program yourself into believing that crap.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Cheese and crackers golly, I never thought that could happen, boy gosh! Kids have been getting dumber for thousands of years, thats why there is never any progress. Rest assured your generation is the last generation of worthy human beings. Feel better?
:P
To actually respond to your points, I think more kids have the ability to communicate with more people. When you were a kid did you talk to people at any given time of day? Did you talk to people from other states or even other countries multiple times a week? If your friend went off to the military or a different college, could you still keep in contact with them at anytime regardless of phone# or address?
My point is that it is so easy to communicate now that this "destruction of language" is superficial. The whipper-snappers talk so much they are impatient with articulation and just make their own communication. Amid all this they still pick up "proper" language when the occasion demands. Thats what happens when you are exposed to so much communication, you are capable of even more.
Bedankt, Opa. Het oude mens in Amerika denkt het zelfde
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
Unfortunately the video game industry and the TV industry are hung up on focus groups. The only thing to ever come out of a focus group is bland. All it takes one in-duh-vidiual who has negative responses and is outspoken about them and magically the marketing wonks tell the TV or game produces, "The focus group hated that." In fact, that's not the case. Only one person in the focus group with a forceful personality hated it. The real story is that the rest of the people in the focus group were either too polite or too non-confrontational to deal with the loudmouth.
If you want a baloney sandwich, hire a focus group. If you want a gourmet meal, hire a chef with some flair and vision to create you a masterpiece. Admitted the gourmet meal costs more, but it's also infinitely more satifying. For those who say that the one hour format simply won't support "good TV", I'd like to point out the following, "The Sopranos", "Southpark", "The Dave Chapell Show", "Deadwood", "The Man Show" (original), "Dead Like Me", "Carnivale", and "Rome". The only thing these shows have in common is that they were produced by and air on cable TV channels. They are not beholden to the network executives and their thrice-dammned focus groups.
For those that say that video games are not good entertainment, I would offer up a few of the rather inventive RPG's I've seen lately, "I of the Dragon" and "Fable". I'd also offer the whole "SIM City" series , as well as the "SIMS" and "SIMS2" since they pretty much redefined the "Simulation" category. The direction that some of the MMORG's are going in is becoming interesting because the players have the ability to revamp the world around them as well as interact with the other players, becoming sort of a group consentual hallucination. Given that some of the religious elements have been "forcing" conversions to their faith in on-line games by threatening lower level players with virtual violence, can you imagine what would happen if you got one of those yahoos in a focus group on say, "City of Villans" or GTA?
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
You may think it's just a game but the longer you entertain such thoughts the more likely you are to program yourself into believing that crap.
As violent games have become commonplace, violent crime rates have declined dramatically. Since GTA3 came out, women have made more strides toward pay equity, more positions of power, and there's been a decline in both domestic violence and rape.
All the evidence I've seen indicates that most people are, in fact, able to distinguish games from reality and there may even be a net benefit to society from "dangerous, immoral" games (acting out impulses in fantasies/games may make one less likely to act them out in reality).
And the parent's statement that "Beating up bitches and killing cops definitely helps on the IQ" was clearly intentionally using such language to show a counterintuitive contrast.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Kids aren't changing the language, but an all-consuming pursuit for validation and individuality lead them to passionately believe that every act of self-expression is far more important than it really is. Slang and poor usage don't evolve the language. 50 years from now, the rules of formal grammar will most likely be identical. Kids will have adopted new slang, a new way to compose sentences so they sound "cool" to their ears, and even then they'll argue that they're helping evolve the language.
Take this to a political forum and you'll see what I mean. The "intelligent posts" usually are the ones you agree with while the uninformed idiots are usually the ones you disagree with.
But that's just human nature.
Personally, I know people who love playing video games who have trouble with basic troubleshooting on that same computer.
If such were the case, wouldn't we see more baseball players with advanced math or physics degrees because they have experience with velocity and curves and such?
I have a nearly 5 year old son that plays video games. One that he used to play (until the wife got nervous about it) was Rayman II. I could see that the games draw was the problem solving elements, it really captured his interest. Plus, the spoken text portions were motivating him to learn how to read - which was, in turn, motivating me to look for computer games that taught reading skills. So, OK, I can see how popular media can be used as a tool to stimulate intellectual development.
Also, I can recall a few years ago reading a study about how children that read a lot of comic books tended to have better reading skills than those that didn't. I believe that, comic books often don't "dumb down" the language. I recall learning a lot of complex words as a child by reading comics. I also understand that a "graphic novel" recently won a Hugo Award ("The Watchers", I think).
On TV, shows like Mythbusters seen to have achieved some popularity. Shows like "The Simpson's" and especially "Futurama" sneak in some pretty sophisticated stuff from time to time as well.
Sadly, TV by and large is still prone to the lowest common denominator. Things like news channels that cycle the same 10-15 minutes worth of stories over and over throughout the day, or so-called "Reality TV" which is really just encouraging the worst in human behavior. In fairness, "Faking It" was cool because it allowed people to explore new experiences and "No Opportunity Wasted" was, in my opinion, the best of the lot, but it didn't make ratings apparently....too bad. Reality TV has gotten so pervasive that there are parodies of it ("Drawn Together", etc.).
So, I guess like everything else, there is good and bad - even in so-called "Reality TV". All the same, the next time someone wants to do "He's a Lady", perhaps we can make it more about what it takes to successfully pull off the role as opposed to simply pandering to gender sterotypes?
Enough pontificating...in the end, I suppose it's how you use the medium/art form that ultimately matters.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Back when you had to outwit a potato before you could eat it. Back when you had to be smarter than the tigers and lions trying to eat you.
Now, I'm supposed to be happy that a kid who can't out-fight an irregular verb on a job application is "smarter" than a kid 20 years ago? Well, at least he can tell me the cheat codes for the coolest games.
No. "The Lord of the Rings" is complex because it was a trilogy of books first. Almost 2000 pages of complexity, compared to the flimsy "she's your sister Luke" of Star Wars. Blech. Star Wars by comparison is like the O.C. in space, give me a break.
And if "Being John Malkovich" is in a sub-genre of films called mind-benders, you would have to be very ignorant of the history of movies not to at least in part attribute the history of the genre to Hitchcock.
Perhaps they seem less like masters of the language, but at least today's kids are capable of reading and writing. Illiteracy was generally accepted 100 years ago, and still somewhat common 50 years ago. Of course, I'm not trying to say we have squashed it completely, but the situation has improved.
- the Hun
I'm a Tasty-vore. If it's Tasty, I'll eat it.
Unfortunately, being intelligent about completely useless topics is still completely useless. So some teenage girl spends age 13 through age 19 reading every issue of Elle, Cosmo, People, US Weekly (that's "US" weekly, not "U.S." weekly ... I know, it sounds like a legitimate magazine but it is just a celeb-stalking magazine), etc ... what good does it do her? Sure, she's developed her ability to collect and retain oodles of information, but right now her resources are all filled up with useless crap about what celeb is dating what other celeb and the latest fall fashions.
... Anything ... Just give them a chance. Right now they are being doomed to a life of pop culture, consumerism, and thoughtless dribble.
And who's not to say that her ability to collect and retain information is not catered to these useless data types (ie, the data type of "fall fashions"). Just because she can retain tons of information about fall fashions does not mean she can understand field lines for differential equations.
This topic ticks me off in particular because I have some young girl cousins (13, 14) and their families do nothing but feed them this useless crap. Instead of getting them a subscription to Popular Science or something (maybe even the for kids version), they shower them with Elle and Cosmo Girl. Then they reinforce the whole idea of turning themselves into objects for the boys to chase around by giving them makeup kits, little pink purses, high-cut baby tees, and accessories covered in bling. I try to talk to them about basic science and math, but they just go "huh, really?" and move on to something else. It's depressing because most of their families are non-technical types, and basically they (mainly their female relatives) are playing 'doll dress-up' with their younger siblings/kids/cousins/nieces. This wouldn't be as bad if they would reinforce some intelligent topics as well, even if it were just generic earth science or basic astronomy. Take them on some nature hikes and point out the different types of trees, look at specific plant structures and try to think how each unique plant has adapted to its environment. Take them out into some rural area in the middle of the night and take a gander at the stars. Show them how our solar system is constructed. Look at a globe and point out interesting geographical points on Earth
150 years ago, practically every city-dwelling 14-year-old in the U.S. was obliged to read and understand literature that is beyond today's typical college graduate. What changed? Plenty. It's impossible to say how much degradation should be attributed to generations of pervasive lead poisoning, how much to the deliberate demolition of the successful educational system of the time, how much to the more complex physical culture, and how much to better communication technology.
Pervasive lead poisoning is only now in decline; most Americans still live in lead-painted houses. Unleaded fuel doesn't just make oil, and engines, last many times longer. We should expect continued dramatic improvement on that basis alone.
The replacement of education with an indoctrination system, derived from India's method for keeping its lower castes in line, is one of the great crimes of the last century. Hallmarks of this system include segregation by age, sudden, arbitrary abandonment of activities, pervasive surveillance, petty authority, and enforced meaningless group exercises. (It was installed in the decades after the red scares of 1848 to make any repetition literally unthinkable.) Only in the last decade or two has there been any motion away from this goal, and most people still think of all these oppressive techniques as normal.