...The amount of talent one requires for the primary tasks is greater than any country can comfortably produce, and this will become increasingly obvious. The consequence is that are no people left, clever, competent and resigned to a humble job, to keep the wheels of social amenities going smoothly round. Postal services, railway services, are likely slowly to deteriorate just because the people who once ran them are now being educated for different things. This is already clear in the United States, is becoming clear in England.
Published 1959. Find here for the ur-text on the humanities/sciences split.
And some personal anecdota:
1. The man who handles cardboard at my local dump is highly intelligent and very knowledgable about waste management. Given his age, this ‘poor allocation of human resource’ is likely due to the class system. Would it better if he were a consultant?
2. Many of my smartest friends became corporate lawyers. They spend most of their time doing repetitive, low-complexity work for large salaries. Would it be better for society if we had mediocrities in those positions and my friends working as welders, craftsmen, local business owners &c?
[Other point of interest: “The Sort” sounds like a twitter derivation of the “Big Sort” c. 2000.]
My theory is that, in the US, The Sort really took hold in the early 1980s when the highest marginal tax rates were radically reduced, thus making income a more efficient means of rewarding employees. The places where The Sort has the least hold are those where income taxes serve the place a soft ceiling on upper middle class incomes and cultural and political forces make either emigration to more lucrative states hard or otherwise limit economic mobility.
Would it be better for society if we had mediocrities in those positions and my friends working as welders, craftsmen, local business owners &c?
I think of this often when it comes to teaching—many women who are now doctors would have been teachers (or similar) a hundred years ago, and so now very smart children don’t come into contact with many very smart adults until they themselves are adults (or at magnet programs or events or so on).
But whenever I try to actually put numbers to it, it’s pretty clear that the sort is in fact helping. Yes, education is worse, but the other fields are better, and the prices are actually conveying information about the desirability, here.
Relevant quote from C.P. Snow’s lecture The Two Cultures: fn 25
Published 1959. Find here for the ur-text on the humanities/sciences split.
And some personal anecdota:
1. The man who handles cardboard at my local dump is highly intelligent and very knowledgable about waste management. Given his age, this ‘poor allocation of human resource’ is likely due to the class system. Would it better if he were a consultant?
2. Many of my smartest friends became corporate lawyers. They spend most of their time doing repetitive, low-complexity work for large salaries. Would it be better for society if we had mediocrities in those positions and my friends working as welders, craftsmen, local business owners &c?
[Other point of interest: “The Sort” sounds like a twitter derivation of the “Big Sort” c. 2000.]
My theory is that, in the US, The Sort really took hold in the early 1980s when the highest marginal tax rates were radically reduced, thus making income a more efficient means of rewarding employees. The places where The Sort has the least hold are those where income taxes serve the place a soft ceiling on upper middle class incomes and cultural and political forces make either emigration to more lucrative states hard or otherwise limit economic mobility.
I think of this often when it comes to teaching—many women who are now doctors would have been teachers (or similar) a hundred years ago, and so now very smart children don’t come into contact with many very smart adults until they themselves are adults (or at magnet programs or events or so on).
But whenever I try to actually put numbers to it, it’s pretty clear that the sort is in fact helping. Yes, education is worse, but the other fields are better, and the prices are actually conveying information about the desirability, here.