Given the tiny audience I have at this stage of my blogging career, I’m surprised to get any responses to post, but it does happen once in a while. Once I figure out how to work the commenting system here, maybe I will get responses that way, but for now e-mail is the only way to respond. Anyway, this was in the mail in response to my post about the left side of the bell curve. Here’s the text, without identifying the sender:

Putting aside from the odd subservience to IQ as a rational measure of intelligence and ability (not to mention the implicit assumption that IQ is static), its odd that you don’t mention investment in education at all. Seems like the obvious solution is to restructure our education system to acknowledge that consistent and rapid changes in technology, automation, and cybernation–that is, rapid increases in productivity–will require rapid increases in people’s access to efficient methods of learning.

I feel like this is all rather simple: people whose skillsets are made obsolete require access to resources and assets that enable them to acquire new, needed skillsets.

I’m going to assume that English is not the first language of my correspondent and assume what he meant in the first bit is “reliance” and not “subservience.” Relying on IQ as a rational measure of intelligence is good enough for neuroscience so it is good enough for me. We have a tremendous amount of data on human intelligence thanks to a century of testing. Unless and until someone comes up with a better way to measure intelligence, IQ is what we have. It’s one piece of the puzzle, but an important and reliable part.

Now, the next bit is one area where there is great debate. Can you structure a society-wide education systems to lift the average IQ of the population? Maybe. Ron Unz has written some excellent essays on the subject. Richard Lynn is a good recent example of the counter argument. We can throw Jason Richwine in the mix as another recent combatant on the topic of IQ and education. Then of course we have the dismal results from such programs as Head Start, which is a complete failure.

I’m of the opinion that the data and the science support the argument that no amount of education will alter one’s intelligence. I’d go even further and point to the many urban school systems that spend enormous sums on students. If there is one place where we would see a causal relationship between spending on education and educational outcomes, it would be the urban school systems.  Education could have a non-trivial impact on overall IQ, but so far no one has been able to find evidence of it.

While that debate is interesting, it has absolutely nothing to do with the central problem facing modern technological societies. There will always be a left side of the bell curve, no matter how you view education. Not even the most rabid blank slate fanatic argues that we can raise the IQ level of the bottom half to match that of the top half, resulting in everyone being average. Well, maybe George Bush thinks that, given that he once argued that the goal of his education policy as to make every kid above average.

The fact remains that even in Asian societies that lack a significant African or Amerindian population, there are a lot of people with IQ’s below what will be required in the technological future. This assumes automation progresses as everyone seems to think it will in the coming decades. Even if education can make some difference, all you can do is increase the size of the smart fraction. You will still be left with a large number of adults in the labor pool unable to master anything beyond mundane tasks.

The bit in the e-mail about the obsolete getting new skills is the standard refrain from libertarians to my question. It is merely a dodge. Instead of addressing the question, they answer a different, unasked question. Every human society has a subset of people with a very low ceiling. You cannot ship them away to a colony. You can’t send them off to the lithium mines. They cannot be taught to trade mortgage backed securities or teach gender studies at the community college. Every society has to figure out what to do with them.

Having a small percentage of the population, say ten percent, that is useless either because they are dumb or lack self-control is manageable. When fifty percent of adults have no role in the economy because they lack the IQ to do useful work, that’s a problem no society has had to solve. A large population of idle dimwits getting into trouble is a very new problem that advanced technological states will probably have to solve or they will be destroyed by it. That means a very different form of political organization in the future.

I’ve always been fascinated by the phenomenon of very high IQ people believing utter nonsense. We have been indoctrinated to think that smart people not only believe the right things, they never indulge in crazy fads or nutty politics. The former is obviously the important part of the proselytizing we hear from our rulers. Only dumb or evil people question the Progressive theology. Even putting that aside, most people assume smart people are too smart to fall for crazy ideas, conspiracy theories and so forth.

Way back in my youth I was dating a gal who had a brilliant uncle. The guy worked for NASA and had a PhD in physics. He started out from a working class family and went through college on scholarships and a love of mathematics. He was also very well read in a variety of subjects, which is unusual for math guys. He was also a communist. Every conversation would eventually lead to him ranting and raving about private property and the abuse of the poor by the rich. It was strange hearing a smart guy celebrate Marxism.

Of course, lots of very smart people were communists in the last century. I took a graduate class from a guy who was a Marxist believer. The class was on Marxism, so it worked out pretty well, but it was strange hearing an otherwise smart guy talk reverently about the worker’s paradise. The Cold War was still going so it was even more jarring, especially since he had traveled to the Soviet Bloc. All these years later I wonder how he managed to square what he saw in his travels with what he sincerely believed.

Anyway, I’ve become a fan of Tyler Cowen’s blog Marginal Revolution, mostly because it is that strange conflict of smart people not seeing the obvious.. He appears to do most of the posting, but maybe he has graduate students doing the work. Even though he is in the pseudoscience of economics, he does have a broad range of interests. Being a libertarian economics professor living off the public dime leaves a lot of time to be curious about stuff. Funny how all of the big foot libertarians tend to live off the sweat of others.

Anyway, this post caught my eye today. The first thing was the reference to left-wing blogger Matt Yglesias. I continue to marvel at his ability to fool people into thinking he is smart and interesting. Signalling on the Left is a highly developed part of how they reinforce their faith in Progressivism. Lefties put on the smart, smug guy outfit signalling that they are super smart. Then they go about repeating all the approved bits of the catechism, but with a cheeky twist. Everyone feels good about being in the faith.

A good example of it is the liberal blockhead Janeane Garofalo. She is as dumb as a goldfish, but she has been trained to play make believe on screen. She kits herself in the bohemian outfit, pretends to be smart, while repeating whatever she heard from the TV clown Jon Stewart. Of course, Steward is another great example of the mediocre mind spouting conventional liberal lines in a highly choreographed manner intended to cast him as brilliant. Maybe Yglesias is just doing a form of this that is lost on me.

Anyway, what go me posting about this is how Alex Tabarrok, the other half of the Marginal Revolution blog, starts out great, quickly summarizing that Yglesias post and then his own position on the topic. Then in the last paragraph he veers into the madness of climate change and the need to placate the sky gods. I admit I have a strong bias against the topic of climate change. It’s pretty much just neo-pagan nonsense that fills a spiritual hole for people who fancy themselves as the intellectual elite of the West

That’s the thing. Tabarrok seems like a smart guy, maybe not a genius or even brilliant, but certainly smart enough to be a tad skeptical of climate change. Instead, he is eager to show how deeply he believes in it. It raises the question as to why he, and other above average intellects, feel like they need to repeat this stuff. Maybe it is social pressure or maybe it professional concerns. Politics in the academy can be nasty. Still, simply ignoring this stuff and sticking to safe topics would seem like the better option.

Belief, of course, plays a big role in this stuff. The communist physicist I knew in my youth was not a religious buy, as communism was his religion. For many modern academics, the sub-cultures within Progressivism fill the role of religion for them. Belief is one of those hard to quantify traits in humanity that drives much of what we do. It plays a huge role in social status, which in turn means it plays a role in reproductive fitness. Being seen as pious has always been and important part of establishing social status in settled society.

This is a long way to go to juts point out that smart people often believe nutty things, but it is something that cannot be said enough. People can be wrong and be smart. Even smart people get things wrong. At the same time, even brilliant people need to believe in something and often they believe in crazy stuff. It may be that the lack of a formal, retrained religion for the elites results in smart people searching around for something to fill the void and landing on kooky new age fads and destructive civic religions.

One fun way to scandalize most decent people is to tell them half the people in the world are below average in IQ. Americans hate the idea of IQ and fixed biological traits. The reason for this is free will is tightly wound into the American creed. We have rights and we are judged by how we exercise those rights. The multi-billion dollar self-help industry exists,m because Americans are sure you can improve on what God gave you. It is a central part of the American myth that we can be anything we choose to be.

It is also what drives so much of social science and government policy. No amount of evidence to the contrary will convince us that you can’t get better and smarter. It’s why the  phrase “Flynn Effect” has become an involuntary response from liberals whenever the subject of IQ is raised. Whenever the topic of IQ comes up on-line, the comments will have people swearing the Flynn Effect means IQ is malleable. That means the reason little Matumbo is dumb is not nature, but an insufficiently funded school system.

The fact is, though, IQ is real. Most of every population falls into the category of average IQ for that population. Then there are some that are dimwits and others with above average and even genius level IQ. Every population of humans has an average IQ, just as they have an average height. Europeans tend to be smarter than other populations, on average. This is one reason why Europeans raced ahead of the rest of the world starting in the 15th century. Not the only reason, but an important one.

European societies have a relatively large number of above average IQ people compared to other populations. This advantage did not count for a lot until technology permitted enough extra to support a leisure class. Once Europeans societies were able to afford a leisure class, the smart fraction was able to accelerate the progress down the road to modernity. On the other hand, the societies lacking the human capital to create a leisure class, also lacked a large enough smart fraction to overcome scarcity.

This is and interesting paper on how technology is changing our labor markets. The fact is, technology works great for smart people. It offers all sorts of new ways to make a living and make life easier. Even credentialization has not limited this. Every business has a need for smart people. I know lots of people who have changed careers a few times, because the demand for their smarts changed. The demand for IQ is constant. Even those with professional degrees have adapted in a similar fashion.

For the people on the left side of the bell curve, it is a different story. Their skills are narrow and they acquire new skills slowly. Technology is often making their skills obsolete. That’s one reason why we see stagnant wages and unusually high unemployment rates among the unskilled and semi-skilled. It’s not the only reason, but technology also makes it easier to plug on foreign low-skilled labor, thus making open borders more attractive. Many fall into a condition of chronic under employment.

The question is what to do about it.

Everything is relative. When I was a boy, by grandfather would tell me stories of his youth in the second decade of the last century. He was born in 1910 and came over here at some point from Russia. That was always a mystery. The family was dirt poor, but he remembered it fondly. He told stories of the Depression too. Of course, he had stories from the war years. Again, all were fond memories despite the fact he and his family survived great deprivations. All of us tend to romanticize our youth when old.

Our younger years are the best of times, even when those times are terrible. The reason is youth. Being young means having hope because everything is in front of you. Even if the present is terrible, it’s all you know and tomorrow is another day. I have fond memories of the 1970’s, even though my family could barely keep the lights on. I was a kid and did not care. I had fun anyway. The turmoil in the greater society did not touch me and I have no way to compare my circumstances with the alternatives, so I enjoyed my youth.

Anyway, this post by Ashok Rao is interesting and a bit scary. Fake unemployment is at ~7.5% right now. Real unemployment is something closer to 11%. Some claim the figure, when backing out the part timers, is probably over 15%. I’ve always hated such games, but the government keeps playing games with the numbers. This WSJ article is a good read on the subject of part-time workers. What jumps out from Ashok’s post is that job gains have flattened out now. We see that in the weekly numbers and the monthly NFP.

The reason for the troublesome labor numbers is that employers are filling jobs with temporary workers when possible. There are lots of incentives for avoiding any permanent increases to their work force. There also the availability of indentured servants from abroad. No one ever talks about the fact that the labor pool keeps growing at the same pace as job growth and this is due to the flood of foreign workers. Instead, the government just keeps pushing their fake employment numbers, hoping no one notices.

What this means, form the perspective of present workers, is that we are in the bets of times. if you are a boomer looking to retire, you don’t care. The good times are gone anyway. The 20-somethings, on the other hand, are getting screwed and are going to get even more screwed. This economy, with all of them living at home and hustling part time work, is as good as it gets for a while. Looking at the recent economic data, we are headed into a period of near zero growth, when you net out money creation.

Of course, the employment numbers are largely worthless, as they assume things have not changed since the 1960’s. When the labor force was domestic and its growth was organic, the statistics meant something. Now that employers are permitted to import ringers from abroad to drive down wages and get around labor laws, those numbers are meaningless. The only number that counts for anything is the workforce participation rate, but that is never advertised as it reveals the truth of the current labor markets.

One of the things you learn quickly when working with complex software is that one tiny change in one area of the program can result in unexpected behavior in another, unrelated, part of the software. Even when you know the software in detail, you are often surprised by the results of small changes. The reason for this is complexity does not grow linearly. Every new condition added to the program, results in multiples of processes and outcomes. The possible results easily exceed your ability to keep track of in your head.

Anyway, the social planners never seem to get this or even recognize it exists. They are so confident in their power to model the new socialist man they blithely assume all sorts of things about the human condition. ObamaCare is a good example. They started with one goal in mind. They wanted to transfer the costs of giving middle-class health care to the poor from the government to private business. The obvious solution was to force employers to pay for their employees insurance, as part of their regular compensation.

Then they realized that the unemployed and seasonal would not get coverage so they came up with the individual mandate to solve that one problem. This sounded like a brilliant solution. If you did not have health insurance, then the IRA would chase after you and maybe some other agencies would harass you. Then some one noticed that the people in the underclass could not afford insurance and were no scared of the IRS. After all, the IRS only terrorizes taxpayers and no one in the ghetto pays taxes. What to do.

The solution was expanding Medicaid and subsidizing private insurance. This means passing new laws and regulation to force states to expand Medicare. On and on it went until the result was a 2,000 page bill requiring tens of thousands of regulators writing tens of thousands of pages of regulations. All of which would be layered on top of the existing tens of thousands of regulations. A massively complex system was going to bolted onto an already massively complex system the legislators did not understand.

Since becoming law, we have been treated to a series of unexpected results. Employers are afraid to hire, not knowing the consequences. Their lawyers quickly figured out a way out of the mandate by moving full time people to part time. Hundreds of thousands have lost benefits because they are now considered part time. Now, cities in financial trouble will follow suit by throwing their workers onto the government system to avoid paying health care bills. It turns out that more complexity was not the answer to the problem.

The result of all of this is pretty much the opposite of what the ObamaCare designers expected. Instead of decreasing the cost to government, costs will go up faster. Instead of more people with insurance, you will see fewer people with insurance. Doctors, seeing their earnings prospects decline are leaving the system and finding ways to carve out private systems for upper middle-class clients. On and on it goes. A myriad of unexpected outcomes accelerating the collapse of the health care system.

Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know. The opposite of that is being in Congress.

When I was a lad in the 1980’s, the Reagan Revolution was just starting and being a right-winger was the hip cool thing. Those dreary lefties with their shaggy hair and linen colors were sad reminders of what went wrong with America in the 70’s. Low taxes, reducing regulations, free trade, getting government out of the way and making money were suddenly cool. Twenty years of liberalism will do that do a nation. The disastrous results on the 60’s and 70’s meant the first step was to roll back those errors. The fact that the state was not rolled back was hidden by the economic boom of the 80’s 90’s.

Ever since, the American Right has been locked in the 1980’s. No matter the circumstance, they offer up the same solutions. It is always cut taxes, cut government and boost business. Thirty years have passed since Reagan, yet the Right has not changed their message. A good example is James Pethokoukis in this National Review piece. He blames liberalism for Detroit’s problems. He suggetsts tax cuts as the solution., believing people will risk their lives to live and work in Detroit if you give them a tax break.

The men and women who ruled over Detroit for five decades did not come from another planet. They are the product of the Detroit culture. They were elected by the people of Detroit. They promised to do what the people of Detroit wanted from their government. Further, Detroit is no more liberal than San Francisco or Portland or Boston or Cambridge. Vermont is a whole state full of liberal gay guys. None of these places suffer from anything like we see in Detroit. Heck, everyone knows why Oakland is not San Francisco.

The problem is this. White people like and support civil society. They will do what it takes to make it work, even while conducting experiments against reality. Black people like chaos and mayhem. That may seem harsh, but chaos and mayhem are the rule every black people rule, so you have to assume they like it. This is the iron rule of life. Societies are result of the people. Black people make black societies and whites make white societies. This is true in all times and all places. Economics is a result, not a cause.

Unless and until the Right figures this out, they will be chasing the sunset.