There’s a tension inherent in any critique of the American system: yes, on the one hand, we have tons of absurd bureaucracy and corporate bloat that prevents people from living up to their potential. On the other hand, we are witnessing one of the most spectacular technological breakthroughs in history, which is almost completely due to the high-IQ American tech ecosystem. So our talent wastage can’t be that bad.
I think the synthesis is that we simply have far more talent than we can effectively use. In a country of 300 million people, which can draw the best talent from around the world, IQ is simply not a scarce commodity, so squandering it on bureaucratic nonsense just isn’t a big deal in a macro sense.
“than we can effectively use” is not an exogenous quantity. More people means more available intelligence, but also means more users of intelligence! So, yes, it can be “that bad” if the counterfactual where our promotion mechanisms weren’t fanatically devoted to crippling the best of us is sufficiently better than our actual reality.
Is it an attainable counterfactual, though? The only positive counterexamples you presented were a centuries-old Ottoman practice, and the aftermath of the worst war ever. These days, though, it doesn’t seem like anybody anywhere in the world does meritocracy better than the US, however faint a praise this might be, so clearly the problem is far from trivial.
China’s track record suggests a more recent positive trajectory, so that their measured quality of life seems on par with the US despite the US’s vastly superior per capita endowment as recently as 1980, and their industrial and technological capacity is not unambiguously inferior.
Well, I do agree that either an especially benign new religious movement or an especially benign communist dictatorship might be the way forward, but that still leaves more questions than answers.
There’s a tension inherent in any critique of the American system: yes, on the one hand, we have tons of absurd bureaucracy and corporate bloat that prevents people from living up to their potential. On the other hand, we are witnessing one of the most spectacular technological breakthroughs in history, which is almost completely due to the high-IQ American tech ecosystem. So our talent wastage can’t be that bad.
I think the synthesis is that we simply have far more talent than we can effectively use. In a country of 300 million people, which can draw the best talent from around the world, IQ is simply not a scarce commodity, so squandering it on bureaucratic nonsense just isn’t a big deal in a macro sense.
“than we can effectively use” is not an exogenous quantity. More people means more available intelligence, but also means more users of intelligence! So, yes, it can be “that bad” if the counterfactual where our promotion mechanisms weren’t fanatically devoted to crippling the best of us is sufficiently better than our actual reality.
Is it an attainable counterfactual, though? The only positive counterexamples you presented were a centuries-old Ottoman practice, and the aftermath of the worst war ever. These days, though, it doesn’t seem like anybody anywhere in the world does meritocracy better than the US, however faint a praise this might be, so clearly the problem is far from trivial.
Calvinist England is a well documented culturally near case.
China’s track record suggests a more recent positive trajectory, so that their measured quality of life seems on par with the US despite the US’s vastly superior per capita endowment as recently as 1980, and their industrial and technological capacity is not unambiguously inferior.
Well, I do agree that either an especially benign new religious movement or an especially benign communist dictatorship might be the way forward, but that still leaves more questions than answers.