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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.
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.
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.
... 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!
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%.
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
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
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?
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
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.
Heh. Because no one uses Cold Fusion anymore.
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.
Classic right wing move there - to act as if income tax is all there is.
No, you are mistaken. ;) The classic right wing move is to act as income tax is all there is, and then compare it as if it's a head tax, and we should somehow be concerned as to what overall percentage is paid by what group of people.
Hey, other people out there, did you know that 0.03% of people pay almost 40% of the gas taxes? (Warning, numbers made up.) Yeah, they're called truckers, and they pay that much because they drive that much.
Likewise, the top 10% pay a huge percentage of income tax because they have all the income. It's not rock science. We're taxing income, not people. (That, really, is the most surreal thing about this, that literally they're using the fact that they make a shitload of money as evidence they are taxed too much.)
Anyone who, in any form or fashion, states what 'percentage of people' pay what 'percentage of tax' is lying. (Well, you get a pass because you were doing the same thing as me above, pointing out how absurd that.) That is called lying with statistics, and it is an actual real lie, people.
The 'non-lying' way to state it would something like 'The top 25% of income covers 70% of the taxes.'
This is, of course, on top of the fact, as you point out, that income tax is hardly the only tax there is. The poor pay more, percentage-wise, of the payroll tax, and a higher rate (but less total) of sales tax.
This is on top of the fact that the rich actually don't pay a higher rate of income tax, simply because they have dozens of ways not to get taxed.
Oh, the '10% pay 90%' is, in fact, wrong. The top 10% pay 70%, as was pointed out by others.
So it's quadruply misleading. He's lying about the actual numbers, he's stating the stats in a way deliberately designed to mislead, he's ignoring the fact that top 10% actually make about 50% of all income, they just rig it so they only pay taxes on half that, and he's, as you said, ignoring the fact that 'percentage of income tax' is not 'percentage of tax'.
Classic right wing move, indeed. Almost textbook.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?