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The Rise and Rise of the Cognitive Elite
hessian writes "As technology advances, the rewards to cleverness increase. Computers have hugely increased the availability of information, raising the demand for those sharp enough to make sense of it. In 1991 the average wage for a male American worker with a bachelor's degree was 2.5 times that of a high-school drop-out; now the ratio is 3. Cognitive skills are at a premium, and they are unevenly distributed."
Isn't this more an indiciation of a widening income gap between working class and middle class backgrounds? There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
...the more I look to hire high school drop-outs and illegal immigrants.
Seriously, don't Kids These Days want to put in a full day's work and pay some dues any more?
This is an alternative interpretation of the data:
In 1991, the average American with a bachelor's degree earned 25% (?) of what the top 1% earned. Today, the fraction is 7% (?). Cognitive skills are no longer valued as much as they were.
Another contributor to the increasing ratio of college-educated salaries to those without has been the decline of manufacturing. There was a time over the last 2-3 generations when someone without a college degree could still get a decent job in manufacturing with benefits and good pay. There was value in skilled trades. The specific example I am thinking of is the automotive industry, where an assembly-line worker could make $20-30 an hour with benefits, and a good machinist could earn as much as a white-collar. Whether that was prudent or sustainable economically or socially is another matter, but it was the case.
With the decline in manufacturing jobs and labor unions, brought on by increased productivity, increased global competition, and the economic downturn generally, it is harder for the uneducated to find jobs that don't have shit conditions for a shit wage.
More recently, the economic downturn has hit those without college educations disproportionately high (manufacturing, construction, etc.), which would tend to depress their median income level, leading to a greater skew that might not otherwise be there.
Isn't this obvious?
In 1991, computers were still relatively basic, the internet was very rare and you needed lots of unskilled workers if you wanted to do anything.
Nowadays the simple tasks are done by computers, machines or robots - and so the only people which are truly needed are those which can do jobs that technology can't.
So instead of having a line of factory-workers screwing in the top of toothpaste tubes, you have a robot doing that, and you just need the people who designed, maintain and upgrade it.
In my experience (WARNING! ANECDOTAL! WARNING!) I have found that intelligence and money are not closely correlated (except possibly in an inverse relationship). For instance, coders who can't code get the fast track into management. Sales guys often get paid many times what the company's top engineers make.. Hell, I had one coworker who couldn't sit through half a f*cking meeting, but got paid 5 times what I did to go to conventions and schmooze.
The reason that people with degrees are earning relatively more as time goes on is not about intelligence. Instead, it is a consequence of the dumbing-down of the university system; compared to 50 years ago, a bachelor's degree means nothing in terms of actual knowledge or ability. As a result, every job with any element of skill whatsoever now requires one. By marking the difference between a completely unskilled job and a skilled job, of course the wage disparity will be higher than before when some skilled jobs didn't require a degree.
Okay, I understand the need and usefulness of "bright people." But then the summary goes on to discuss a person with a college degree vs. a person who dropped out of high school. That's where it loses me because there is no shortage of moronic idiots with degrees and there are a number of people who dropped out of high school for reasons other than they couldn't handle the mental strain. (In fact, all that going through high school proves is that they can complete their work as cognitive skills are simply not required!)
There needs to be another measure as attending school does not make anyone a better thinker... at least not in today's environment.
Could that be the case? Yes. If schools did more to teach people to think better, then yes. But tons and tons of people simply don't want to take "irrelevant courses" where they complain "when will I ever get to use this?" Okay, so they drop philosophy and geography and foreign language courses. So once these "irrelevant" classes are pruned, what's left? "Job training." Great. Now we have worker drones instead of thinkers.
Are we sure that this is a result of the "cognitive elite" being more in demand, or high school dropouts' demand plummeting slightly faster than bachelor's degree holders? From what I've seen education and skills are less important than luck--you know the right people, you managed to pick a major that's temporarily in demand, etc.
but who is having more offspring? (insert idiocracy joke)
Ratio of 3..
I wonder what the drop outs companies like Google, Facebook, MS et al do to that ratio? Looks like if it wasn't for those "big few", the remuneration ratio for a drop out is probably higher to something like 500 to 1
... just because you have a lot of smart people does not mean they will be put to use.
A lot of ideas from the mythical man month also apply to clever people and large intellectual projects from various sectors. That being one largely of scalability.
http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959/
"Cognitive skills are at a premium, and they are unevenly distributed."
So are physical skills. Which is why there are only a couple hundred guys in the world good enough at catching a football to do it for a living.
Life is unfair and uneven.
Isn't this more an indiciation of a widening income gap between working class and middle class backgrounds? There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
I think that's what the article is trying to point out. Take this statistic FTFA as an example.
In America, for example, in 1987 the top 1% of taxpayers received 12.3% of all pre-tax income. Twenty years later their share, at 23.5%, was nearly twice as large. The bottom half’s share fell from 15.6% to 12.2% over the same period.
I work at a typical institution that shall not be named. It's a fucking diploma mill and the grads can't do much of what high school grads back in The Day took for granted.
Two-year degrees mean so little that I would ignore them and test the applicant thoroughly.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
...the more I look to hire high school drop-outs and illegal immigrants.
Seriously, don't Kids These Days want to put in a full day's work and pay some dues any more?
You tell'em! These whipper snappers think that they can go to school, party, come out with a degree and automatically get a decent paying job!
Back in my day, we didn't have all this Globalisation! All we had to do is compete with Japan and Germany and they cheated with their efficiency and better quality - I tell you!
Now, we have these trading "partners" like China where we can get the labor done for a fraction of the price! And I tell you me, it's been helping ALL of us! Just look how our standard of living has increased! Why the cheap products available in the China Outlet Store (Walmart) have never been cheaper!
Can't compete with China or India?! Well something wrong with you, kid! In my day, we had to compete with those damn cheap Southerners - you know, that cheap labor in the Carolinas, Georgia and other Southern States. They were paid a whole 1/4 less and we did it! So can you. So what that a Chinese man makes less than a tenth of what you do! You just need to be 10 times more productive!
Job went to India!?! Well, you just need to learn more skills and get them up to date and be 10 times more valuable! All you got to do it work harder - just like the CEOs! Why they busted their ass to have their Father get them into Harvard! An then they had to network constantly at keggers so that they can make the contacts to get those CEO jobs when they get out! It's hard for them to ship jobs overseas so that they can ruin a company and then get their 100 million dollar bonus!
I tell ya! Kids these days!
Now, get back to work and fund my Social Security and Medicare! I have to go to the doctor and then the Cadillac dealer because there's a new model and it'll look good in my Second home in Florida!
An educated fool is more foolish than an uneducated one.
;)
Can't remember where I read that, but it chimes true. Lord help you in an argument against someone who has been brainwashed to think they know their god's honest truth.
*disclaimer - I have my associates so I am only half a fool
There are 2 sides to every bell curve, and not every child is above average. What we're seeing is reality (and to some extent class, upbringing) re-asserting itself.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Apparently it's all perfectly wonderful that existing race, gender, and class privilege translates to better access to technology, access to private schooling, growing up in the language/culture of the middle and upper classes, and other determinants of financial success. That way we know that the most deserving can do the most highly paid and socially valued work like engineering new ways to kill people, marketing/branding/manipulating public opinion, speculating on the markets and draining value from the real economy, managing and controlling workers, further entrenching the legal power of corporations in the courts, etc. The most genetically fit earn big bucks and everyone who is poor is there because they are lazy and stupid and do socially valueless work like teaching, manufacturing, transportation, food-service, etc. This is the Economist; what do you expect?
All this talk about the unfairness of socialist redistribution is rather absurd as well. Capitalism involves the most massive redistribution of wealth ever--redistribution from those who produce value (workers) to the ownership class (capitalists) (and their professional techno-managerial class lackeys). An economy under workers self management that allowed everyone to receive the product of their own labor would be vastly more fair than our current state-corporate oligarchy.
For some more illuminating data on inequality, check out Dumhoff.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
I'm well on my way to a masters in theoretical physics, and I can't tell you the countless number of brilliant, formally educated people I know who are barely making it. The income difference between the educated and uneducated is simply due to the fact that you now need a university degree to do the same job that someone would have been hired out of high school and trained for 50 years ago. The minimum education level requirements to get a job these days has increased, and it's almost always unwarranted. Another consequence is that our universities now resemble high school more than they ever did.
The pessimist might point out that this so called "hugely increased availability of information" has simply increased the amount of information available from "more than even the brightest human could assimilate in a two dozen lifetimes"(have any of our brave techno-futurists tried walking into a good-sized library sometime in the past few centuries?) to "some factors of 10 more than used to be available, much of this 'new information' being data-mining junk like credit card records and Wal-mart's inventory."
The news isn't so much that bright people are at a premium(society has always had its technocrats, going back to when "technocrat" meant "literate, probably related to some priesthood and keeping accounts for some king"); but that the bottom has absolutely fucking fallen out of the market for everybody else at approximately the same time that any legal, social, and cultural brakes on how much the people on the top can make have been removed.
There was a period(in retrospect, quite possibly a historical anomaly) where "blue-collar, single income" might have meant some hard physical labor and some risk; but it didn't mean that you had totally fallen off the bus compared to everyone else. People raised families, owned homes, that sort of thing. Thanks to a mixture of robots and offshoring, the number of such jobs has been sharply reduced(not to zero, at least during housing booms, skilled but 'blue collar' tradesmen often do ok or better); but job availability and pay across the highschool or less sector, as a whole have fallen like a rock and show no signs of ever recovering.
In fact, the fact that the ratio of high-school drop-out to BA/BS holder has only moved from 2.5 to 3 likely supports the pessimistic hypothesis. Despite the fact that the supply of good blue-collar jobs has been absolutely gutted, the ratio has only climbed slightly. That isn't "cognitive elite" money, that is "I'm white collar because I work in a cube, not a jiffy-lube" money. There is an elite in the US, possibly created in part by certain cognitive attributes; but it is so stratospherically above the dropout/BA/BS divide that it isn't even relevant.
In terms of net worth, the top quintile holds ~85%, the bottom four the remaining ~15%. If you restrict that just to "financial wealth"(ie. ignoring largely illiquid assets like houses and cars that are held mostly for use, and considering cash, financial instruments, and the like) the top 1% hold ~40%, the top quintile ~90% and the bottom four quintiles, together, less than 10%.
The dirty little secret of modern America is that a significant amount of the college graduates we have today would, in a saner economy, be the semi-skilled manufacturing labor force competing with third world labor. Most college graduates have actually fewer skills after 4-5 years of college than most high school graduates who do something more complicated than retail or food service.
The problem is that you can't say that mos college graduates should actually be working in a factory straight after high school because that implies the following:
1) You hate the poor (how liberals will see it)
2) You're an elitist (how many conservatives will see it)
3) You want to deny the American Dream(tm) to millions (how the non-ideological will see it)
4) You don't believe everyone's kid is above average.
5) You believe college should be the domain of the intelligent and elite, not the average man on the street.
Yet here's the thing. A key part of why we are so in debt is because every Tom, Dick and Harry believes that they are entitled to a standard that is "upper-middle class" by world standards... just for showing up on the job. Our national problems could be solved if we'd admit that a stratified society is not only natural, but healthy (which is not the same as saying that 1% should control 90% of the wealth, that's another argument).
The reason the standard of living for the common man rose so rapidly from the 19th century to later 20th century is that we had the gold standard, which secured the value of their labor on one end, and we didn't indulge in ridiculous social engineering to make everyone equal. Now, we have nearly $1T in non-dischargeable student loan debt and no future for many millions of Americans. Instead of more of the same, how about we repeal NAFTA and go back to a sound currency so we can rebuild our manufacturing base and stop forcing square pegs (the average worker) into a round hole (advanced education and the work that it should support).
Today those who successfully finds ways to leech on the educated creative & smart people's work are the most rewarded elite. I long for the day that the world really belong to those who peruse knowledge morality & creativity. Today, perusing only money and power is too rewarding.
It's hard to imagine that the discrepancy between what a candidate has on his/her resume and what a candidate is actually capable of could have ever been greater. There are kids coming out of college that are barely literate and totally incapable of communication with people outside of their own social circle. The real kicker is that they're wildly confident and clueless about their own limitations.
For every IQ point my computer picks up, the line dividing "Your life is AWESOME" and "Your life is HELL" moves up a notch. Eventually there will be very few if any people above the line. I would hope by that point we will have come up with a new way of doing economics... otherwise, I guess we just try eat the rich through a wall of killer robots.
I've known a number of rich kids in my life. Some of them are the most lazy useless wastes you'll ever meet. I've also been to 3rd world slums, some of them full of the most hard working people in the world. Why is this?
Do the rich deserve to be rich, and the poor deserve to be poor? No, most of the discrepancy in wealth is not due to hard work, but class structure: nepotism, corruption, who you know rather than what you know or how hard you work. I'm not saying that some poor don't rise up, and some rich don't sink down, as is deserving of their character. And in fact the USA does a better job of meritocracy than most other countries. But so much else going on is NOT meritocracy, clearly.
For that reason, many libertarian beliefs only serve to reinforce existing class structures, because so many libertarians don't understand how unfair the distribution of wealth is. In a just society, you NEED to artificially distribute wealth down, because the existing structure naturally concentrates wealth up.
Libertarian philosophy starts with this insane assumption that society is a meritocracy, when all evidence is to the contrary. I agree that society SHOULD be a meritocracy, but to make it a meritocracy, you need to artificially counteract the natural tendency of wealth to attract more wealth.
Libertarians: class structure is real, and growing in the USA. Now you can deny that, or you can do something about that. But making castle-in-the-sky pronouncements about adhering to a meritocracy that doesn't fully exist is just an exercise in fooling yourself.
Some people need to read less Charles Darwin, and more Charles Dickens.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
but healthy"
no. because you assume that the stratums in society are determined by pure meritocracy. there needs to be more churn: rich kids sinking because they are lazy brats, and poor kids rising because they work hard. but it never works that way. in every class structure, there is corruption, nepotism: who you know rather than what you know or how hard you work. such that, over time, all stratified societies do not function anything like meritocracies. you wind up with marie antoinettes on top, who have vast wealth and do not work, and poor people who are truly gifted, but denied any right to ascending as they naturally should if society were a meritocracy. when they see the injustice of the system they are in, they naturally become revolutionaries to break the unjust class system that unjustly keeps them down
so to avoid revolution, which is highly unhealthy, you need to artificially counteract stratified societies. simply because such societies are inherently, undeniably, unjust, and not in any way like the meritocracies you believe them to be
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You could just as easily explain the relationship between college and income by social networking..the people who have the better jobs went to school with the rich people who are hiring, even without having gained any cognitive skills (or any other skills for that matter) in college. I thought that was the point of a BA.
It's about time someone made a crisis out of educated people making more money than everyone else; all the crying over our society's devaluing of education was getting old.
I mean it is nice to know but since the /. crowd is clearly on the clever side of the cleverness scale, we should all be well off right? Right?
Of course there are a lot of people who dropped out of high school who are smarter than those who attended college. If you'd read and understood the point of the article, you'd realize that this is an innately obvious piece of information that in now way detracts from the point of the article.
Statistically, people who attended college now are more likely to make more money than high school dropouts than was the case in 1987.
Firstly, the point you should have been making if you'd wanted to be at least partially on topic is that there are high school dropouts who make more than people with college degrees.
Secondly, the term "more likely" does not mean that ALL college graduates make more than ALL high school dropouts. Therefore, pointing out that you know high school dropouts who make more than college-educated people should elicit a "yeah, so what" response. Of course that's the case. These are statistics we're discussing, not anecdotes.
The article also doesn't state that people who go to college are smarter than people who drop out of high school. In fact, it attributes the inequity to a number of factors, including school quality, education of parents, upbringing, geographic region, and yes, intelligence. The point really is that on average, from a financial point of view, sucks more to be smart, born to poor parents, and living in a poor area than it does to be dumber, but born to rich parents in a good neighbourhood.
www.clarke.ca
Isn't this more an indiciation of a widening income gap between working class and middle class backgrounds? There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
Agreed.
More specifically, it is a sign of the disappearance in America of the relatively high-paid manufacturing jobs, the classic "blue collar" jobs. In my parents time, a person could make a good living in a job on the auto line, or working in the steel mill. These jobs are gone (or, if not totally gone, there are a lot less of them then there were.)
Simultaneously, the absolute numbers of Americans getting college degrees is going up, and so even jobs that don't actually require a degree are taking people who have one, except for the minimum wage jobs at the very bottom of the scale (typically in the "service" economy).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Cognitive skills are at premium, absolutely, and the premium is going to grow. We're living a Knowledge Society, folks, that's what it means. However, and this in extremely important and most people get this wrong, "smarts" doesn't cut it. While we truly are a Knowledge Society, we are even more a Network Society. Communication skills allow for exchange and will beat smarts every time. Cognitive skills are still at premium, it's just that communication is the most important part of that.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Earning a degree has nothing to do with class. Anyone can get into college. Can't afford it? Join the military, get loans, scholarship or work three jobs while going to school.
Oh, sure, you can... but it is hard. If your parents are affluent enough to pay for college, or even to assist with paying for college; it is easy. (or at least, easier.)
I served two years in the US Army, took out loans and worked two jobs to put myself and my wife through college. I have a bachelors and my wife earned her masters. We were both raised by single parents who worked multiple jobs to put food on the table. Neither of our parents paid for our education.
Which is exactly the point. It's hard.
Congrats to you for sticking it out despite obstacles, but when people have to serve two years in the military, take out loans, and still have to work two jobs to pay for college, no surprise, but a lot of them don't make it through.
Of course, it helps to have mommy and daddy pay your way so you don't even have to hold a job while in school.
Bingo.
I knew some of these people, and frankly, I got much more out of college than they did.
And if the discussion were about "getting more out of college" and not about "getting into college," then that would have been relevant.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Without the product, what gets sold? Your company can work fine without management. It'll manage to make some money without sales staff. Without workers, you have no product. The only member more important than the worker is the customer.
We need more tech based schools based on the trades system (that HAS ON THE JOB apprenticeships) not the old 4 year college mind set even the old 4 year system is to little for some HR PHD for level 1 jobs? help desk level 1?
And why do HR people look down on community colleges? and tech schools? why should going to a college that is more well known for it's sports teams beat people who when to tech colleges?
Why should tech people have to deal lots of way off topic filler classes?
The thing set there are lots smart tech people who are not cut out for the old college system that can do the work in a real job.
Another related point here is the overall cost of tuition and how it affects the supply & demand of educated workers. As tuition fees are rising (much faster than inflation ), there's going to be less and less people deciding to go to school at all. From the link, "Cost of living increased roughly 2.5-fold during this time (1978 - 2080); medical costs inflated roughly 6-fold; but college tuition and fees inflation approached 10-fold". This isn't just the states either - every year I went to University in Canada they raises the tuition by about 7 or 8% per year. And wasn't it just tripled in the UK?
Well, it comes as no surprise then that less people decide to get a bachelor's degree, the demand for these workers goes up. No higher eduction or taking a trade just seems like a better option to most people than spending tens of thousands of dollars on education (and risk not finding a job after that). They see a bachelor's degree as the new sucker's game.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
Oh, sure, you can... but it is hard
Exactly. I want employees that can do hard things.
Which is exactly the point. It's hard.
Congrats to you for sticking it out despite obstacles, but when people have to serve two years in the military, take out loans, and still have to work two jobs to pay for college, no surprise, but a lot of them don't make it through.
Right. It's hard. Do you want an employee whining that "it's too hard. Eff-it!" or do you want someone that was not only able to support themselves, but put in the extra "hard" effort it takes to improve themselves?
Those that didn't make it through can work on the line, making $30k/yr until they decide to go back and finish making it. Those that have made it can make $75k/yr and watch over those that are not motivated enough to complete the hard stuff.
And for the record, my jobs paid for my computers, furniture, car, rent, utilities, dates, and of course, beer (or other intoxicants). The GI Bill paid for my classes, books and fees. Later, after I was married, the jobs paid bills while the loans and scholarships paid for the wife's degrees.
And if the discussion were about "getting more out of college" and not about "getting into college," then that would have been relevant.
Actually, this is a discussion about what you get out of college. It is a comparison between those with college degrees and those that dropped out of high school.
And BTW, it is hard for those that have their college paid for as well. None of my professors asked how I pay for college, with the exception of one. This one actually offered to give me a break because he said he knew how hard it was to support a family and still go to school. Of course, I didn't need the break and turned in my assignment on time, but the offer was there.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Professional implicit information application will always define real smarts.
Elitist explicit information regurgitation will always define idiots.
The ability to regurgitate is a valuable testing cognitive skill.
The ability to regurgitate is not a significant indicator of intelligence.
The person that can apply Training, Experience, and Knowledge (TEK) to solve novel/anomalous problems is of far greater importance than the pitiful delusional cognitive elite with puking memory skills.
Education pedagogy is evolving with technology well beyond the ancient wrote-learning paradigm that recognizes fact-vomit as interesting, but of little value in solving atypical a/o asymmetric problems. IOW: If you cannot think and apply to create, innovate and build, then expect excellent memory skills to relegate you, at best to a reference catalog/secretary (not even a librarian).
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I disagree here.
"Padding Resume" ... = "Lying". For once if you get one of the smart HR Reps who thinks laterally, I wouldn't want the defending side of "So if the first 5 lines of print you have submitted to me are lies, how can I trust you?".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Using dropouts is a mistake. If you compare high-school graduates with college graduates, the "cognitive elite" don't do so well. Many high-school grads go into the trades (plumbing, carpentry, etc.) and now make more than their "cognitive elite" peers. When you sum over their career history, they make _more_ than their "cognitive elite" peers.
This is key. The far side of huge credentials is Age Bias & "Over-Qualified".
"Hi. I am a nuclear physicist with a specialty in cutting edge cold fusion."
"That's nice. Why are you applying for a Javascript coding job?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This is true in the Military as well...it's a lot harder to gain rank if you do not have a degree. Sure, you can do the correspondence courses and other studies for promotion points, but one of the first things they look at on the promotion board is whether or not the candidate has a degree.
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I want employees that can do hard things.
Or at well off layabouts, which was the point being made.
Sure, the poor can get through college with a lot of work.
Thus rendering them almost equal to the rich who can coast through college on the family dime.
I say 'almost' because the poor still won't have connections, and can't wait around months looking for a job. They'll get a job working for someone who just graduated from a 'good school' by doing half the work.
Assuming, of course, they don't get killed or maimed during their military service, fighting whatever war the rich want Or there's stop loss and they can't leave.
Just because things are 'possible' for the poor doesn't mean we don't have a class system.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I dropped out of HS to join the Army. My work ethic makes most degree earners look like slugs in comparrison. I now have an upper management position in a very lucrative and secure company after serving in the US Army SOCOM. All acheived before I had my college degree.
The only reason I earned one, was because I needed to fill some "requirement" for HR, not because it had anything to do with ability (I was already doing the job!).
Until someone is put to task, you'll never know the true measure of a person. I know plenty of degree holding bartenders.
Getting a college degree isn't "hard" at all. Most liberal arts degrees mean you showed up for class.
Colleges are a business. They are willing to take anyone's money. When I hire I look at "qualified" applicants without degrees first. It takes much more dedication and creativity to become competent and experienced by playing on the bounderies, than following the party line.
However, I will say, it sure ain't the easy way.
I have great sympathy for you but my guess is the HR people are being told to make a long list from all the applications in too short a time, companies are failing to spend enough time checking through applications. Or believe they can get a good enough applicant using their current processes.
I should imagine for many places the HR departments are being told to reduce the pile of all applicants (say 100) to a long list of say 10, in not much time, an hour or two. So the first thing they'll do is give the pile of 100 to a methodical but junior member of staff and say "weed out all those who don't have the list of qualifications that we required in the application, and if you still have 50, then weed out those that don't have the list of desired qualifications". Then a more expensive more senior member of staff will take the 30 and look through them briefly to get it down to ten.
I think you're probably right, whether they do this manually or by computer they probably just do a match and chuck out everybody that doesn't match...
I have been in the IT field for 20 years. It's not about how hard you work in school or at work. It is getting the job done on time, making your boss look good, and social networking. If you are a nice guy who can explain technical issues in a non-technical way, you will have many more opportunities for advancement. On the college side, the problem isn't the students, but the parents. I walked to school everyday rain, snow, or shine until I got my driver's license. It wasn't a big deal though, all of my friends did it too. Somehow though, they bought into this nonsense that nameless faceless people would steal their children. Maybe they have extremely low self esteem and live vicariously through their kids. Parents today do not let their kids out of their sight for more than 15 minutes. I see too many "helicopter" parents hovering over their children and their friends. Part of critical thinking is learning from mistakes. Parents have to let their children be independent and make some mistakes so they can figure out how the world works.
"Ones and zeros were everywhere. I even think I saw a two!" - Bender
Not true that the rich pay the lions share. Once you factor in ALL taxes, fees etc (like sales tax, property tax vehicle millage, excise taxes drivers license fees etc) than the actual burden of government is about 40.4% across ALL income levels.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/YourRealTaxRate40.aspx
The poor pay ~40%, the rich pay ~40% etc. Std of 5.3% There are a couple of outliers...like families making 150K are taxed at 54% while families making 50K are taxed at 25% but generally everyone pays about 47%
Now the big issue as I see it is that historically when you have anything BUT a progressive tax system (rich pay more) you gradually move to a feudal type system. A few rich lords (or CEOs) and everyone else is a serf. It makes sense since money is fungable and can be transfered between generations and since money tends to breed more money, unless you have a method for moving it around it will tend to accumulate to a few.
This is exactly what we have seen happen since Reagan... as the original article argued
Over all the actual tax burden is right around 40% regardless of who you are:
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/Advice/YourRealTaxRate40.aspx
Now the problem is, regardless of how much money you have you MUST eat and you MUST buy heat and you MUST have basic clothing and you MUST have many other things before you can hope to have anything extra to save or to buy an education or otherwise improve yourself.
40% off of 100K means you still have a little cash left over.
40% off of 35K means you can't even get all the necessaties.
I think most HR folk's don't necessarily look down on Tech or vocational schools. In fact most of the folks I know in Recruitment & Selection roles speak very highly of such schools.
The problem is though that those schools are inherently extremely focused. In two years a person can learn all they need for careers in nursing, auto repair, electrical contracting, etc. Those people will be highly technically proficient in their program (much more so than a 4 year Liberal Arts grad). The downside is that their education is a lot less generalizable. 4 year schools have those miserable gen-ed requirements that we all hate, but really do equip students with valuable skill sets like sentence composition and punctuation.
Highly motivated Tech school students can pick up the other stuff on their own. In my experience, unfortunately, many don't. They leave their program as highly skilled technicians with little ability to take on other responsibilities outside of their immediate knowledge area. This really, really limits their value to some organizations.
But if you need a mechanic, you take your car to an auto shop staffed mostly by Tech school graduates. There is something to be said there.
Was it just me, or did anyone else read t hat as "The Rise and Rise of the Covenant Elite"?
Too many videogames for me I suppose....
Heh. Because no one uses Cold Fusion anymore.
Cumulative inflation over the 20 year period being discussed is over 50% (a bit over 2% per year). The absolute dollar wages for high school graduates is flat over the time period (~$50k), and the wages for college grads is up only 10%. (From ~$87.5k to ~96k, reading the graph)
Both groups are paid less - the relative wages are spreading, but only because high school grads are getting screwed more than college grads.
I'm a concientious
These guys didn't graduate from High School, and became super-wealthy anyways.
According to The Screwing of the Average Man, college was originally something wealthy people sent their children to so they'd have a leg up on the under-class. But after WWII, the country had a population of unemployed ex-soldiers. According to Hapgood, the attitude was "okay we fought your damn war. What's in it for us?" Congress passed the GI bill to make college affordable for everyone, and college costs promptly started spiraling out of control.
If you're lacking a degree, it's much more difficult to get people to take you seriously.
Being competent at something is much more important than having a "degree". If you're competent at your trade you can make your own opportunities, and no one will care about your papers. See above-linked forbes story.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
The end result of technological progress probably has to be either socialism xor a horrible dystopia.
From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
When comparing salary, the median salary is often more representative than the mean. This is because the mean will get skewed by the people who make a ton of money (such as wall street bankers), whereas the median will describe a typical salary.
I was too busy reading your various insults to notice any links or factual proofs you may have offered to bolster your rebuttal to the prior poster. What was your point again?
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Two-year degrees mean so little that I would ignore them and test the applicant thoroughly. by couchslug (175151) on Tuesday January 25, @08:36AM (#34993024)
Do you yourself even have a 2 year degree?
I work at a typical institution that shall not be named. It's a fucking diploma mill and the grads can't do much of what high school grads back in The Day took for granted. by couchslug (175151) on Tuesday January 25, @08:36AM (#34993024)
What do you do there?? I mean, for example, if you are a janitor there??? Then I don't think your statements here are quite valid: Especially if you do not have at least a 2 yr. degree in a science yourself (or better than an Associates/AAS degree to your name/credit).
Just because things are 'possible' for the poor doesn't mean we don't have a class system.
Actually, the possibility to rise out of poverty through hard work means that a society doesn't have a class system. It's not institutionalized by the government that poor people must marry other poor people, can only work certain jobs, aren't allowed to go to school, etc. Of course, I'm not arguing that we live in a class free society. You seem to not understand the difference.
I'm using all of my mod points to mod ancient memes down. Please join me.
That same thin' as 'em smart folks?
It's not institutionalized by the government that poor people must marry other poor people, can only work certain jobs, aren't allowed to go to school, etc.
You are talking about a caste system. That's when distinctions are hereditary and enforced and no one can ever leave their caste or marry outside it.
There is absolutely no requirement for a class system that people cannot change class. In fact, there's never been such a class system.
In the past, some sort of external acknowledgment was needed for upward movement, like knighting, but those sort of systems don't really exist anymore either, and never existed in the US, and now if you have the money, you can always buy your way into a higher class.
Of course, I'm not arguing that we live in a class free society.
If you live in a society that has 'class', you live in one with a 'class system'. I have no idea what sort of weird distinction you're trying to make there. Classes exist within a class system.
What you are talking about, with no mobility and actual legal restrictions on what you can do, is a caste system, and scarcely exists in the modern world, unless you count royal families or something.
In a class system, poor people cannot hang out with rich people because the rich people have private clubs and private schools and private colleges and whatnot that poor people cannot get into. (And it's hard to get into them even with money without actually understanding the system, but nowadays, luckily for newcomers, there are enough formerly-rich hanger-ons at the edges who can show you the ropes as long as you let them in with you.)
We used to have a class called the middle class, and I could cite how they were kept out of the rich class, and likewise how they kept out the poor...but it's somewhat moot at this point. At this point, the middle class just imagines they different than the poor.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Maybe emotional IQ *should* be deprioritised, in favor of technical products which are technically good.
For the true elite, "education" must be avoided ( homeschool instead!! ),
because it is so profoundly destructive to one's potential.
LEARNING, however, MUST be pursued...
THIS is partly a product of "education":
http://news.icanhascheezburger.com/2010/11/17/political-pictures-graveyard-of-america/
The reason for that, is that anyone with true genius, or true integrity,
who is in the possession of the education establishment is felt to be a threat to its authority,
and is crushed/broken.
John Taylor Gatto, NY State award winning teacher:
~you can't manipulate a child who is certain of their validity
into performing in ways that make the institution important:
only an insecure, dependent child can be so manipulated~
"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" ( Stephen R. Covey ) pointed out, bluntly,
that before the civil war, it was CHARACTER that people cared to push their development of,
but after either the civil war or WW1 ( can't remember which ),
that changed from character/integrity to personality-status.
In a personality-status system, the highest quality people can't win, to begin with,
because the game doesn't reward integrity, it rewards personality-status!
Did you know that Benjamin Franklin had only a couple of years of "education"?
Read John Taylor Gatto's in-depth book on how "education" was engineered
( based on the Hindu lower-caste "education" designed to PREVENT threat to upper-caste status)
and why:
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
More pervasive "education" is proven ( through draft records ) to LOWER literacy,
( actually read some of the stuff written by uneducated slaves,
and you will be challenged to match some of them!
Learning was pervasive, but "education", or manufactured dumbing-down, wasn't. )
and the education system was paid-for, originally, by the coal industry,
which wanted to wipe out independence/initiative from the worker pool.
If you want to hire the best for the company
& the best for the work,
you have to
1. accept that you can't change their character/nature, but can change someone's skillset
2. find the ones with the character/nature who are good
3. find, of those, who can, with training/education, do the work, &
4. challenge 'em
"trial by fire" -- "Corps Business: the 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines"
( David H. Freedman, senior Forbes editor )
to discover who's really right to invest in.
The western paradigm that people should be hired if they've the skill,
and fired if their character/nature doesn't change to become convenient to the administration,
is defective.
The Japanese paradigm ( European, to some extent, too ), that
you aren't going to change anyone's nature,
you've got to start with the right people,
and then train 'em up to having the skillset needed of them...
is more a long-term/strategic kind of thinking....
The Marines consider HR to be what controls the quality of the corps's future,
so ONLY superstars are allowed to do hiring work, as a strategic determination.
Normal culture, among the Americas, however,
is that one shovel the worthless ones into HR,
and deal with the consequences with arbitrary firings & waves of layoffs.
Which ALSO is a product of the institutional mentality "education".
Reap what you sow!
As for how anyone could succeed without a degree, nowadays, simply get & work through a copy of
"The Definitive Business Plan, 2nd edition" ( Richard Stutely ),
and its companion book on the definitive financials, what smart managers do with the numbers,
"Presenting to Win, 2nd edition" ( Jerry Weissman )
Corps Business ( listed above )
"Organizing from the Inside Out" ( Julie Morgenstern )
"The New D
will always find a way...
It's not the degree that shows competency. It's the drive required to get the degree that tells you what you need to know about a potential employee. For example, a high school drop out is probably not a high school drop out because he's stupid. He's a high school drop out because he is lazy, has a problem with authority, can't/won't follow rules or some other issue that prevented him from finishing high school. (Yes, I understand that there are special circumstances that force some people to drop out of high school that are beyond the person's control; like a sick mother or something.)
In my own experience, people who drop out of school to get a job are some of the hardest working people I know. And college students are some of the laziest. It takes a good deal of self awareness and drive to leave the relative comfort of school and enter the working world. Digging ditches or waiting on tables is much harder work than sitting at a desk taking notes.
I have a Ph.D., and I can tell you the reason I went to grad school was simply that I was too lazy to get out and look for work. That explains in part why it took me so many years to get a Ph.D. I have gained a lot of knowledge and skills, but I'm still a terrible worker.
And the people who leave school for "special circumstances" as you describe them make up a much greater fraction of the population of dropouts than you might think. And they're precisely the kind of people I'd want working for me.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
On the other hand, Steve Jobs is not going around submitting resumes; he started his own company.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I pay taxes which fund the police, courts, and military which directly protect Warren Buffet's wealth from seizure by internal and external bandits. He has much more to lose than I do from social breakdown. So he should pay more, much more, for this protection we all provide. Greater wealth means greater responsibility to maintain our collective security and prosperity.
That was pretty funny. I wonder how many current people on slashdot even remember it though :)
... but I am a hiring manager. I almost always build into requisitions words to the effect of "degree or equivalent experience" - most of our positions could go either way. Sometimes we're hiring for positions where you really, no kidding, need to have a degree, but not very often. Because our work is engineering/analysis, even our technician types have to write a lot, so an associates degree would give you a leg up there - it gives me confidence that you've actually been able to write a paper that an English prof accepted.
Food for thought.
If you have 15+ years of experience, that's probably better than two years of a co-op and a four year degree.
Not necessarily. There are some fields where the amount of experience you have is almost meaningless unless you have the certifications that go with that field. It's not necessarily sensible but that is the way it is. I have 15 years of experience and for some jobs it won't help me a bit if I didn't have the certifications to go with that experience. I've had to get certifications to get considered for jobs I've been doing for years. The certification does not make me one bit better at the job but it did matter more than my experience.
Classic right wing move there - to act as if income tax is all there is. Here's another one for you: 90% of the payroll taxes (Social Security, Medicare) are paid by poor and middle class people, as are the vast majority of sales and excise taxes. The net result is that the total tax burden on rich people is not very much different for the rich than it is for the masses. And the rich, of course, don't miss the money that much.
Right. It's hard. Do you want an employee whining that "it's too hard. Eff-it!"
Walter Chrysler did:
“Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.”
And I think his company turned out ok.
I don't think this is completely true - there are still plenty of skilled labor jobs that effectively can't be outsourced. The guy/gal who comes to do your plumbing, electrical work, HVAC, etc... it's not like they can send your house to Pakistan to get fixed, so the repair person pretty much has to be local.
But yeah, I agree with your larger point - the middle class is getting hollowed out as at least manufacturing skilled labor is going away. And don't think you're safe if you're a "knowledge worker" - capitalism is working on replacing you too. Initiatives such as ISO 9000, CMMi, etc? The object of the game there is to vacuum knowledge out of your brain and into procedures that the company owns - and can get any trained monkey off the street to do for less than you. These programs are nothing more than efforts to turn engineering work from a craft done by skilled workers into an assembly line process that can be done by anyone. I don't know if they'll succeed, but they're trying.
I'm a hiring manager in an engineering firm - my experience is that "these kids today" are mostly just fine. While I've hired a few that have been sub-par, by and large they've been hard-working, smart, good employees. Reports of the decline and fall of western civilization are greatly exaggerated.
Dude, seriously. This state of affairs has been going on since, what 1950? In any case, not nearly long enough to have any evolutionary effect. If we continue going about our social and economic organization unchanged for tens of thousands of years, then we might have issues. But that seems pretty fantastically unlikely.
Not so. I hire a lot of ex-military guys who are technical experts in various weapon systems. I'm way more likely to hire the guy with 20 years experience and the AA than an equivalent person without the degree. Why? One of the things we do a lot: write analysis. The guy with the AA, if nothing else, wrote a bunch of papers for his English 101 class that some community college prof approved of. The guy with the HS diploma didn't. So the AA guy is much more likely to be able to write up his findings without being an embarrassment to the company.
I got no mod points right now... but that was funny - no doubt.
My present is the activity I am currently engaged in with the purpose of turning the future into a better past.
It's east-south-east of Orlando, by the ocean. The jobs are generally for serious nerds.
There are lots of people with degrees, including MS and doctorate ones, but also a few with none at all. We only care that you are really good at what you do.
doubleplusgoodalbert at gmail.com
Nevermind outsourcing and offshoring - it's the machines we have to look out for.
Every year the machines get smarter and better and take out a slice of jobs that would have been done by humans. Machines don't negotiate labor contracts, require pensions, or ask for raises. How many accountants are put out of work by Turbotax? How many bank tellers are put out of work by ATMs? They are coming for all of us. Funny thing is that replacing a person with a machine means that a business makes MORE money - more for the owners and more for the people left.
You can't avoid it. They will come for all of us eventually. I'm just curious what I will do for a living when they make a machine that can do my job better than me.
Define "padding". Saying I worked somewhere for 4 years when I only worked there for 3 is lying. Saying I was instrumental in getting something accomplished might be lying, and most likely padding, but that should come to light during an interview. People who claim to be able to do something they can't (and pad their resume) are either top-notch bullshitters (who I can spot a mile away), or just delusional, and will have no chance of convincing me in an interview that their accomplishments are anything less than padding. People who "pad" their resume to call out their strengths (and probably overstate them slightly) are just getting their foot in the interview door. If they have real accomplishments that might be slightly padded, those will hold weight during the interview.
Please don't lump people willingly subjecting themselves to our broken, stupid, horrifically expensive student visa system in with a bunch of scum sucking bottom feeders with no respect for our laws. Working for a few years in a lab with foreign students who did everything legally (and suffered immensely for it) has destroyed any sympathy I had for illegal aliens.
No, it's not. Get a job, pay your way. It's possible. You might have to live like an ascetic, and you won't be able to go to a school with a 15k/semester tuition, but you can do it.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
> In 1991 the average wage for a male American worker with a bachelor's degree was 2.5 times that of a high-school drop-out;
In Vietnam it was 19.
Nanananananananineteen.
SCNR
A friend of mine who dropped out of college chemistry became a better coder in 6 months than many of my classmates did in 4 years.
Programming has the somewhat unusual feature that it is actually reasonable to teach yourself because the materials needed are inexpensive and commonly available and you aren't likely to cause any physical damage. You really just need a computer and some documentation. If you are smart and have a good memory, you probably can become a passably good coder in short order. It's possible to learn chemistry yourself but getting a well equipped working lab is prohibitively expensive. (Sure you can do some basic stuff cheaply but you can only get so far without spending some serious bucks and/or possibly drawing the attention of law enforcement) Plus even if you did have the lab, learning it yourself carries a lot of danger since there are numerous non-obvious ways to kill yourself. Lots of other professions are difficult to learn without some amount of formal instruction. You aren't going to become a self taught bridge engineer in this day and age. Even some computer related professions like CAD are difficult to learn on your own due to the prohibitive cost of software. (A seat of 3D solid modeling software can be many thousands of dollars) I was self taught on computer simulation but my company picked up the cost of the software which was $15,000US per seat.
In short, just because you can learn to program on your own, doesn't mean that doing so is reasonable for every other activity.
Cognitive elite may be better paid but they are outnumbered by the uneducated. Hence we see large numbers of climate change deniers and tea party adherents.
Holy crap, the only thing truly deserving of a 'funny' mod in years.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
One of several problems with the alleged rise of the alleged cognitive elite, i.e., college graduates and incomes, is that measuring this alleged rise by mean average gross income fails to alert one to several problems. I have 97th percentile verbal ability scores as a mature adult, down from 99 /4th percentile as a high school senior when that made me a National Merit Scholarship finalist. I only have one earned doctorate, from one of our leading universities generally ranked near the top in my field. I know a lot of other people with bachelors’ and advanced degrees. Like an awful lot of the rest of the people I know, an awful lot of those I know with high intelligence, degrees, including advanced degrees in math, physics, and other fields supposedly in demand, and ambition, are now, and likely will remain, unemployed or terribly under-employed.
Recently published data suggests something that a lot of us had suspected: A huge percentage of college students don’t actually learn anything, or much of anything, in college. Thus, using college graduation as a measure of the “cognitive elite” is ludicrous.
As for cognitive elites, let’s face it, the Chinese and a couple dozen other countries, some of which you probably couldn’t name and which we used to think of as poor, benighted, Third World, etc., outrank us not only in college and advanced degree enrollment and graduation, but in English as well as math. Unless you believe in racial theories of intelligence, and I don’t, something is wrong. I have hired a number of high school seniors, and others, whose IQ scores, for example—a very imperfect measure of what one can be expected to do with their brain in real life in my view—are well above average, who, like far too many, from native-born, English-speaking homes, have been allowed to get to that point without becoming fluent in spoken and written English, or learning to balance a checkbook much less excel in higher math and computers.
This article does note that today it can take someone, especially someone not born with a silver spoon, to age forty (40) just to break even after accounting for the opportunity and education costs to get there. That’s way too old, beyond the best child-bearing years, for example, and at a point where, laws to the contrary notwithstanding in tough times, you have probably already been told, as I was at 38 “You’re too --- ---- old.” Lots of luck if you’re 50 or 55 and get laid off in the new economy.
There are an awful lot of our cognitive elite, many of whom I know, who can’t find a job using their education or much of it, or which pays enough to cover their debts and other cash and opportunity costs of higher education. I knew one bright, motivated individual just shy of finishing his dissertation and boards for his Ph.D. in math and physics who taught one computer course at the state university here but had to turn to roofing to make a living. I know two more Ph.D. candidates, one in math, who found the best job they could get was teaching English in China. Computer and defense contract people I knew who were making $80,000.00 to $100,000.00 have found themselves commuting halfway across the country for temporary jobs at a fraction of their former salaries, when, after stints loading boxcars for minimum wage, they can find anything using their cognitive abilities, which is resulting in bankruptcies, family breakdowns, suicide attempts and suicides in these families, etc.
My primary abilities are verbal rather than in math, and real incomes for most of those in my field, even if, like me, you graduated in the upper third of a selective class from a top university at the graduate level have not kept pace for a generation, and are now dropping for the handful at the top whose employers have and their clients, whose incomes were essentially insulated from any real broad market. I remember when the same thing happened to the aerospace engineers, etc. Ther
And in fact the USA does a better job of meritocracy than most other countries.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/mar/10/oecd-uk-worst-social-mobility
Top 3 of least social mobility (~= meritocracy): UK, Italy, US
Top 3 of most social mobility: Denmark*, Australia, Norway (* I live here)
You have been told the American Dream, I take it? Then again, "non-OECD countries" is a good approximation of "most other countries", so I guess I agree, but I would encourage you and your readers to put that statement in perspective.
Also, I suspect the opportunities for relative social mobility give people an incentive to do the things that create a rising tide of upward absolute mobility for all boats, which makes a country rich and an OECD country. (So what I'm saying: there's a selection bias due to a correlation the other way when only comparing against rich/OECD countries).
The existing structure naturally concentrates wealth up.
Personal liberty, private property and well-functioning competitive markets (with internalized externalities) seems to be a good way to create a prosperous, mobile and fair society. What could stand in the way?
For one, if you're rich, after paying taxes and life's necessities (and maybe conveniencies and amusements) you often have money by which you can earn more money, and more so than the poor.
Also, taxes and other government fiddling might be regressive. Milton Friedman points to some progressive-intended regressive transfers in Free To Choose; you can watch clips on youtube (GIYF). His negative income tax is guaranteed to be regressive.
Thirdly, you might have exclusivity deals, monopolies, externalities and government corruption/bribery/lobbying. This will tend to favor special interests (especially those too big to fail) at the expense of "the rest of us". Also, you might have heritable special priviledges.
I agree with you: progressive transfers are a good thing, especially if you're a utilitarian---grep "Daniel Kahnemann" ted.com for a presentation of why.
For that reason, many libertarian beliefs only serve to reinforce existing class structures, because so many libertarians don't understand how unfair the distribution of wealth is.
I'm not one to defend libertarians---I by and large disagree with their views---but I think you misrepresent them. Or at least you don't represent the narrow subset I know of. Which is mostly through podcasting: Brett Veinotte (School Sucks), Wes Bertrand (Complete Liberty), Stephanie Murphy and Mike something (Porc Therapy) and Stephan Molineux (Free Domain Radio).
Their viewpoint is one of deontological morals: the moral value of an action is determined by the action itself, not its eventual outcome. Furthermore, what is moral is private property and non-agression: you're free to do whatever you please as long as you leave other people and their stuff alone. This is an argument against taxation, which they like to describe as the involuntary extraction of money by force or threat of force. They tend to be market-oriented and believe that free markets don't have problems, or that their problems are better than the problems of the state.
I think the state does something wrong (see exclusivity deals above), but free markets and private property has problems in itself as well: if land is a fixed-supply resource and increasing population means increasing demand, you can speculate in land (buy now, sell later) and extract money by renting it out to a landless population. I think the fix is land value taxation: turn the value of the rent into public property. If you're inclined towards math and economics, see also the Henry George theorem.
Germany has probably gone further in the past 75 years than any nation in becoming a more inclusive society
I think you mean 65. Godwin agrees.
yeah europe is great
as long as you aren't an immigrant
europe concentrates its immigrants in ghettos and denies them the social mobility you cite. they don't even talk to or mingle with immigrants. one wonders why european countries ever let immigrants in in the first place. japan is like europe in that way: it is extremely anti-immigrant, even as its population ages. but to japan's credit, it actually has prevented immigration, so even though it's attitude sucks, at least it matches its words with its actions. europe meanwhile will let the immigrants in, but then treat them like crap that doesn't belong there
immigrants in the usa do far, far better than in europe
as far as your defense of the cult of capitalism: i am a capitalist. but capitalism need social safety nets. pure capitalism is social darwinism which is a form of evil
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
young ladies graduation speech.
If we were looking for traits that are not already in the population (people with wings) then sure, evolution would be slow.
If the selection pressure were mild (avoidance of a 1-in-50000 cancer) then sure, evolution would be slow.
Evolution is damn fast when the selection pressure is high and the desired trait is already in the population. In the extreme, it just takes a generation. Want immunity to HIV? Simply inject everybody with it, let 99% of the population die, and suddenly humans all have natural immunity.
Idiocracy has some fairly severe selection pressure going for it. The effects will be seen within a few generations. Some of us may even live long enough to see it, though most will place the blame on something else. Arguably it is already measurable; the Flynn Effect has died out and possibly reversed.
as far as your defense of the cult of capitalism: i am a capitalist. but capitalism need social safety nets. pure capitalism is social darwinism which is a form of evil
I agree; not just safety nets, but progressive transfers, regulation to completely internalize externalities (pollution for one). Quoting myself,
free markets and private property has problems in itself as well
Note also I advocate land value taxation and (parts of) Georgeism; I'm told he was a strong workers' rights advocate, so I'm not pro big business or pro the rich people.
All that is to say: I have an issue with you saying that the thing I defend is a cult. I believe markets generally do well, based on the arguments economists use, and I assume that observational data and empiricism enters into those arguments and/or the validation of them. According to my limited understanding of how markets work, doing medicine on the market ought to work fine, but in practice socialised medicine appears to work best. Maybe the incentives are wrong or maybe the consumers are irrational or something, I'm not sure. But I'm pro socialised medicine because evidence says it works. I don't think a market cultist would be.
College is in no way an indicator of intelligence: as many people have said, it's an indicator of economic status. The very existence of a show like Campus PD reveals college for what it is: a giant daycare center for rich children.
All throughout high school I was told that while things were easy now, college was srs bznss. When I got to college it was pretty clear that this was just an excuse for rich idiots to put off having a job for another few years. The only difference between high school and college is the multi-thou price tag, which means the only thing a college degree says about you is that you're in a little more debt than everyone else.
That said, I think the effect of this on employers is the opposite. Its gotten to the point that any average schmuck can get through college, so if you don't have a degree, employers think it means you're slightly stupider than the average schmuck. This statistic doesn't mean clever people are making more money, it just means stupid people are making less.