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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.
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.
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.
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.
As one of those Kids These Days: When I was in the "paying some dues" stage of my career, I didn't mind putting in a full day's work. I did mind putting in 14-18 hours a day 7 days a week for pay that amounted to about $7.50 an hour for months on end. Call me unreasonable if you like.
I am officially gone from
Seriously, who would like to do that?
The response of the college grad would rather be:
"seriously, dude, like, who, like, so, like, whatever, like do that?"
i.e. most college grads I have met, particularly in the last five to ten years, are basically unable to speak, read or write in a coherent and grown-up manner - let alone do a proper days work.
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
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
And the won't get off your lawn, either!
Seriously, are college grads today really any worse than the counterculture from the 60s/70s? Or Gen X'ers in the 80s/90's? Or pretty much every generation in history (Back through at least the Ancient Greeks, and probably beyond)? It is in our nature to assume that our cohort is the pinnacle of human thought, and all generations before and after had, have, and will have mannerisms that are contrary to what "decent people" should aspire to. Don't blame this generation, your generations was probably just as stupid (and just as reviled) as this one when you were 20.
Capital generates no wealth. "Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn." Labor creates all wealth. Yes we can be more productive with better technology, but capitalists: private owners, managers, and investors do not create better technology, they only charge us for the "right" to use tools that our class (the engineers, miners, teamsters, fabricators, chemists, programmers, etc) created in the first place!
Moreover, capitalism is highly sub-optimal for creating "wealth" in the form the most advanced technology, best satisfying human needs, and minimizing externality costs. Market demand is all based on short term individual profit. Basic science that benefits all of industry/humanity and takes decades of investment generally needs to be paid for socially, not by through market investment. (Universities, national labs, NASA, the military industrial complex, etc). Human needs are not well satisfied by a system that gives more "votes" to the small class that has the most dollars while letting poor kids go uneducated, sick, and malnourished. Under capitalism, firms have an incentive to externalize as many costs as possible and force third parties to pay for things like pollution, systematic risk (bailouts), etc.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Actually all the evidence suggests that the less stratified the society, the healthier it is. You only have to compare the UK to the Nordic countries to see the social (and economic) problems caused by uneven wealth distribution.
Actually, it was down to industrialisation, vast natural resources, and various mechanisms to ensure that everyone benefited from growth and productivity gains. Such mechanisms included high taxes on the rich, worker safety legislation, and strong unions. Not to mention grand government projects to push forward technology and stimulate the economy.
The greatest era of prosperity for the average American was when income distribution was the most equal. Since the taxes were lowered, and the unions smashed, nearly all of the economic gains have accumulated with a small elite, and the American dream is dying a painful, lingering death.
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
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.