I’m actually not sure how true this is on average. Nerds are overrepresented in tech and other abstraction-heavy fields, yes; but not all nerds have a personality or a set of interests that lends itself to such a career, and the nerd package seems to be bad news outside of one. If the set of nerds that successfully go into those careers is small enough relative to the set of nerds at large, then the demographic might not end up being disproportionately economically important, despite what you’d guess from looking at e.g. Bill Gates. I don’t think anyone’s studied this halfway rigorously, but anecdotally the nerds I know seem to end up with massively bimodal financial outcomes.
Of course, anything that impacts the productivity of any demographic without commensurate gains elsewhere is going to end up being negative, and I’m pretty skeptical about possible gains here.
I’m actually not sure how true this is on average. Nerds are overrepresented in tech and other abstraction-heavy fields, yes; but not all nerds have a personality or a set of interests that lends itself to such a career, and the nerd package seems to be bad news outside of one. If the set of nerds that successfully go into those careers is small enough relative to the set of nerds at large, then the demographic might not end up being disproportionately economically important, despite what you’d guess from looking at e.g. Bill Gates. I don’t think anyone’s studied this halfway rigorously, but anecdotally the nerds I know seem to end up with massively bimodal financial outcomes.
Of course, anything that impacts the productivity of any demographic without commensurate gains elsewhere is going to end up being negative, and I’m pretty skeptical about possible gains here.