American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth (2016)
This article reads a bit too much like Brave New World. The article suggests to, literally, <i>&quot;...provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy.&quot;</i> Preventing technological progress to ensure that we can have the &quot;less brainy&quot; spend their time carrying out tasks that are completely pointless? But it&#x27;s okay, we can make sure they have plenty of soma - so they never concern themselves with their life&#x27;s work being completely and absolutely pointless. Or does the author just assume they&#x27;d be too dumb to ever consider that? The problem with trying to be so overtly embracing is that it often reveals one&#x27;s prejudices ever more clearly through implicit consideration of what is said.<p>I completely agree with the article that the decreasing relevance of individuals who are not all that bright is going to be an increasing problem. And this problem is confounded by really awful demographic issues. Fertility rate is strongly positively connected to low education, low income, and high religiosity. But at the same time trying to reshape society to embrace slower individuals is going to just result in an even greater stratification of society. We&#x27;re already economically stratified with some implicit intellectual stratification. This would make the shift from implicit quite explicit as those who value intelligence would end up separating themselves even more overtly from the &#x27;new and improved&#x27; society that has been, in the words of the article, reshaped <i>&quot;with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority&quot;.</i><p>I also find the constant social science efforts to link &quot;low&quot; educational spending to decreased academic performance to be very questionable. At least by PISA scores many of the countries now outperforming us academically spend substantially less on education than we do. For instance Vietnam is now ahead of the US in math and science. In fact, they&#x27;re 8th in the world in science. Their purchasing power parity GDP&#x2F;capita is $6,925 ($2,305 nominal) and a total of 6.6% of that goes to education. That&#x27;s $450&#x2F;capita, parity compensated. In the US we spend 5.6% of $61,687 per capita which is $3455&#x2F;capita - north of 700% greater than Vietnam&#x27;s spending, parity adjusted. And even if you just take it in terms of poverty itself, the average income in Vietnam is around $1,800 a year - that&#x27;s about $5,400 parity adjusted. Poverty is widespread in Vietnam. So is academic excellence. You can&#x27;t just spend your way to people valuing and embracing education.<p>- [1] Convenient listing of the 2015 PISA results<p>- [2] List of nations by percent of GDP spent on education, one click away from conversion to parity adjusted $&#x2F;capita<p>- [1] - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-math-science-reading-skills-2016-12" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-mat...</a><p>- [2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_countries_by_spending_on_education_(%_of_GDP)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_countries_by_spending_...</a>