Posted on 08/15/2005 7:34:36 AM PDT by Molly Pitcher
Actually, IIRC H/M said that Americans might be able to find valued places in society, but not as long as there is a massive centralized welfare state working against the purposes of local community. It's been awhile since I read their book, but they were gloomy about the ability of a highly meritocratic society to get along unless significant changes were made in that society.
My wife was surprised, when she immigrated here, at how hard Americans have to work for everything.
I explained to her that America doesn't promise to make anyone rich. What you get is opportunity.
Not everyone makes the most of it, and alot of folks fail. But they get the chance, and that's a damn sight more than most places offer.
Never under-estimate Jesse Jackson.
Does Mr. Parket suggest that George Washington Carver was some kind of an intellectual fluke? That the children of crop dusters will produce only cropdusters? What a Darwinian crock!
Has anyone noticed that the systematic dumbing-down of our "educational" system is producing endless crops of spiritually crippled Elitist parrots without a shred of critical-thinking ability?
Those "tests" that are ostensibly devised to measure this ever increasing superiority have been modified to the point of banality for the purpose of turning out intellectually fatuous and morally vacant corporatites.
I thoroughly disagree and object to the tone and conclusions of this pathetic analysis.
Well said.
Since there will ALWAYS be some people with nothing... as a society becomes richer... isn't it inevitable that the gap between the rich and poor will grow?
And that's fine. The only thing we need to guarantee is that:
1) Anyone who is sufficiently self-motivated can educate him or herself at a reasonable cost through Internet courses and self-study options.
2) "Based on education" doesn't translate to "based on graduating from a select list of twenty schools."
Lower class emulates upper class -- empire is rising.
Upper class emulates lower class -- empire is declining.
Considering that the media and certain rich kids believe it's both cool and fun to be impoverished crime-ridden inner city minorities, the current state of "class" indicates we a nation in free-fall.
Yes. Also, I wonder if they are mistaking what we often call "success" or a high income with true intelligence. I know many people that could've gone onto very high paying jobs if they'd been born into the right circles - let's face it, in many instances it IS who you know and not what you know. You can learn the what very easily but getting in the door might require some effort. Also, there are plenty of rich and very high level people that produce children that grow up to be selfish, greedy and unwholesome. We had a very interesting story here in Cleveland over a year ago about a man that went through the most elite of private schools and he ended up screwing a bunch of people out of their investments (look up Frank Gruttaduria on Google) and he would have been considered in this upper tier, according to this article. They can HAVE their tier!
Denying that intelligence has a hereditary component doesn't make it so.
Of course this doesn't mean that every smart couple will birth nothing but smart kids nor that every stupid couple will birth nothing but stupid kids.
But lets say for the sake of argument that if 90% of all births to 2 intelligent people result in intelligent children, while only 10% of births to two stupid people result intelligent children... the guy would have a point, that meeting your spouse in college could result in a widening gap of intelligence.
At the rate they limit their own family size (and abort the rest), they may very well darwin-ize themselves right out of existence. One can hope :-))
Yeah - I agree. Just because the gap is growing is not a bad thing. It just means that wealth in America is growing.
Living in Mississippi, I have seen a great explosion of wealth in parts of the state (while living other poverty stricken areas in the dust).
Increased wealth in America is a good thing. And conservatives more than liberals are likely to be advantaged by this.
I've read the Bell Curve...liberals should be very afraid.
Intelligence doesn't denote honesty.
You can be both smart and a crook.
What part of the Great State? I grew up in Jackson...right down the street from North Park Mall.
Cropdusters? You have to be a pretty good stick (pilot) to be a successful cropduster. It's not a lower class job, IMHO. And yes, I know a pilot who's father was a "duster," and went another career path from spraying fields with needed chemicals so we can have healthier, more plentiful food.
This is not surprising. The universal availability of college education was first available to our parent's generation. So the smart ones, even from working class backgrounds, went to college.
Thus, my grandfather was a migrant farm worker and a hard rock miner. He was plenty smart but the result of being the child of very poor Italian immigrants in the 1890's--they didn't go to college. But my father was a rocket scientist. I'm a professional. High correlation between my father's income and mine. Low correlation between my grandfather and my father. High correlation between by grandfather and my great-grandfather.
Smart parents tend to have smart kids. Once the class barrier to college education was broken, the decorrelation between generations will last for about one generation and then reassert itself. It's not a sign of anything other than the fact that the effect of universal college education has now worked it's way thru the system.
The only way in which this may truly have changed is that with smarter boys and girs going to college, I suspect that smart boys and smart girls are more likely to end up married to each other and that the kids may be supersmart, on average. So in that sense, there is probably a larger class of very smart folks than existed before.
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