The Rise and Rise of the Cognitive Elite 671
hessian writes "As technology advances, the rewards to cleverness increase. Computers have hugely increased the availability of information, raising the demand for those sharp enough to make sense of it. In 1991 the average wage for a male American worker with a bachelor's degree was 2.5 times that of a high-school drop-out; now the ratio is 3. Cognitive skills are at a premium, and they are unevenly distributed."
Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this more an indiciation of a widening income gap between working class and middle class backgrounds? There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
Re:Class Difference (Score:2, Insightful)
But those people are still working at McDonalds, or at 7/11, or pumping gas, even with their degrees.
Just having a piece of paper from some academic institution, even if it's "reputable", means little in the real world. Just having a degree in art history, English, sociology or psychology won't get you a well-paying job. You'll just have knowledge that's generally useless, or otherwise widely known by most people in other fields, too.
It's not just a problem in America, either. Indian-trained software developers are a great example of this. Although many have degrees from Indian institutions, sometimes even what they claim to be an equivalent of a "Masters" degree or better, they often don't have the necessary knowledge to get any sort of real work done. The various papers and documents they hold are absolutely meaningless.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's the fault of HR departments. They refuse to believe you might be intelligent without a degree. Which is why I'm trying to get the degree that goes with my job. Hopefully this debt I'm building is useful.
Changing which way? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an alternative interpretation of the data:
In 1991, the average American with a bachelor's degree earned 25% (?) of what the top 1% earned. Today, the fraction is 7% (?). Cognitive skills are no longer valued as much as they were.
Another contributor (Score:5, Insightful)
With the decline in manufacturing jobs and labor unions, brought on by increased productivity, increased global competition, and the economic downturn generally, it is harder for the uneducated to find jobs that don't have shit conditions for a shit wage.
More recently, the economic downturn has hit those without college educations disproportionately high (manufacturing, construction, etc.), which would tend to depress their median income level, leading to a greater skew that might not otherwise be there.
I call BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Class Difference (Score:2, Insightful)
On Slashdot we don't like to talk about class. We'd rather just pretend it doesn't exist, it makes ineffectually complaining about the government while continuing to support the status quo easier.
Srsly though, not a troll. Come on guys.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
What does school have to do with cleverness? (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, I understand the need and usefulness of "bright people." But then the summary goes on to discuss a person with a college degree vs. a person who dropped out of high school. That's where it loses me because there is no shortage of moronic idiots with degrees and there are a number of people who dropped out of high school for reasons other than they couldn't handle the mental strain. (In fact, all that going through high school proves is that they can complete their work as cognitive skills are simply not required!)
There needs to be another measure as attending school does not make anyone a better thinker... at least not in today's environment.
Could that be the case? Yes. If schools did more to teach people to think better, then yes. But tons and tons of people simply don't want to take "irrelevant courses" where they complain "when will I ever get to use this?" Okay, so they drop philosophy and geography and foreign language courses. So once these "irrelevant" classes are pruned, what's left? "Job training." Great. Now we have worker drones instead of thinkers.
Re:I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, I had one coworker who couldn't sit through half a f*cking meeting, but got paid 5 times what I did to go to conventions and schmooze.
Clearly you're underestimating the value of a good schmoozer. Connections are very important in business, as important as the quality of your product.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that HR departments are home to some of the least cognitive people on the planet.
Want to know how you get through the HR "filter" to someone who can actually make a hiring decision? You fill your resume with meaningless garbage, "certifications" from overglorified cert-mills and degree-mills, pad your experience by about 3-5 years, and do whatever else it takes to fit the computerized filter. And you do this not because it indicates any ability to actually do the job, but because the first thing the HR idiots do is stick all the resumes for a given position in a pile and order a computerized filter to drop all the ones that don't have a precise combination of keywords.
Ability to adapt to new jobs/situations? Not looked for. Have 20 years in the field but been working all that time rather than building up student debt? Sorry, guess you didn't match the keywords they wanted in the "education" field.
Re:The More Young College Grads I Meet... (Score:5, Insightful)
As one of those Kids These Days: When I was in the "paying some dues" stage of my career, I didn't mind putting in a full day's work. I did mind putting in 14-18 hours a day 7 days a week for pay that amounted to about $7.50 an hour for months on end. Call me unreasonable if you like.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this more an indiciation of a widening income gap between working class and middle class backgrounds? There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
It isn't so much a widening gap between working and middle-class...
Once upon a time, skilled labor was the middle class. But the middle class is slowly disappearing. We're outsourcing and offshoring everything we can. All the skilled labor jobs are going overseas.
Here in the US we've basically got unskilled labor, and management.
And that gap is widening. We replace more and more labors with machinery. We make individuals more productive with technology. We offshore what we can.
And the laborers become less and less skilled, and more easily replaced. So they can be paid less.
And the managers we actually have left here in the US are those that are harder to replace. So they must be paid more.
And eventually we have just the upper and lower classes.
Re:The More Young College Grads I Meet... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, who would like to do that?
The response of the college grad would rather be:
"seriously, dude, like, who, like, so, like, whatever, like do that?"
i.e. most college grads I have met, particularly in the last five to ten years, are basically unable to speak, read or write in a coherent and grown-up manner - let alone do a proper days work.
Re:I call BS (Score:4, Insightful)
^THIS^
I can't stress this enough, emotional IQ is as important if not more important to success as technical intelligence. The best built software in the world is useless if nobody can sell it. It's really time for technical folks to stop bitching about how unfair this is and start trying to teach themselves interpersonal skills and sales skills. Get a job in consulting where both are highly valued. A good technical person that can also schmooze, sell and build relationships is worth their weight in gold.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the degree that shows competency. It's the drive required to get the degree that tells you what you need to know about a potential employee. For example, a high school drop out is probably not a high school drop out because he's stupid. He's a high school drop out because he is lazy, has a problem with authority, can't/won't follow rules or some other issue that prevented him from finishing high school. (Yes, I understand that there are special circumstances that force some people to drop out of high school that are beyond the person's control; like a sick mother or something.)
On the other hand, take your typical liberal arts graduate. Sure, they may not have learned how to perform advanced math on hex numbers while in college, but they have shown that they are willing to learn new ideas, do the hard work, follow the rules, see a task through to completion and generally put up with the bullshit that you have to put up with in order to get the degree.
It's not the degree itself that matters. It is what getting the degree says about the person who got it.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
On Slashdot we don't like to talk about class. We'd rather just pretend it doesn't exist, it makes ineffectually complaining about the government while continuing to support the status quo easier.
Srsly though, not a troll. Come on guys.
Earning a degree has nothing to do with class. Anyone can get into college. Can't afford it? Join the military, get loans, scholarship or work three jobs while going to school. I served two years in the US Army, took out loans and worked two jobs to put myself and my wife through college. I have a bachelors and my wife earned her masters. We were both raised by single parents who worked multiple jobs to put food on the table. Neither of our parents paid for our education.
Of course, it helps to have mommy and daddy pay your way so you don't even have to hold a job while in school. I knew some of these people, and frankly, I got much more out of college than they did. Sure, they may have better stories to tell as they were available for every kegger on campus. But I learned how to work to midnight on the far side of town, complete my assignments and still make my 8:00am class.
Re:Class Difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, if you had a class system, the sons of presidents would become presidents, and senators kids would become senators.
Wake up! Just because a few buck the trend doesn't mean that you have very very very low social mobility in the USA - aka a class system.
Re:I call BS (Score:5, Insightful)
Schmoozers are their own pricey little bubble. The only reason you need schmoozers is to connect with other schmoozers. If we all chopped the schmooze department off the balance books, we could get back to doing real business deals without all the pomp and fluff.
The Myth of the Meritocracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I've known a number of rich kids in my life. Some of them are the most lazy useless wastes you'll ever meet. I've also been to 3rd world slums, some of them full of the most hard working people in the world. Why is this?
Do the rich deserve to be rich, and the poor deserve to be poor? No, most of the discrepancy in wealth is not due to hard work, but class structure: nepotism, corruption, who you know rather than what you know or how hard you work. I'm not saying that some poor don't rise up, and some rich don't sink down, as is deserving of their character. And in fact the USA does a better job of meritocracy than most other countries. But so much else going on is NOT meritocracy, clearly.
For that reason, many libertarian beliefs only serve to reinforce existing class structures, because so many libertarians don't understand how unfair the distribution of wealth is. In a just society, you NEED to artificially distribute wealth down, because the existing structure naturally concentrates wealth up.
Libertarian philosophy starts with this insane assumption that society is a meritocracy, when all evidence is to the contrary. I agree that society SHOULD be a meritocracy, but to make it a meritocracy, you need to artificially counteract the natural tendency of wealth to attract more wealth.
Libertarians: class structure is real, and growing in the USA. Now you can deny that, or you can do something about that. But making castle-in-the-sky pronouncements about adhering to a meritocracy that doesn't fully exist is just an exercise in fooling yourself.
Some people need to read less Charles Darwin, and more Charles Dickens.
"a stratified society is not only natural, (Score:4, Insightful)
but healthy"
no. because you assume that the stratums in society are determined by pure meritocracy. there needs to be more churn: rich kids sinking because they are lazy brats, and poor kids rising because they work hard. but it never works that way. in every class structure, there is corruption, nepotism: who you know rather than what you know or how hard you work. such that, over time, all stratified societies do not function anything like meritocracies. you wind up with marie antoinettes on top, who have vast wealth and do not work, and poor people who are truly gifted, but denied any right to ascending as they naturally should if society were a meritocracy. when they see the injustice of the system they are in, they naturally become revolutionaries to break the unjust class system that unjustly keeps them down
so to avoid revolution, which is highly unhealthy, you need to artificially counteract stratified societies. simply because such societies are inherently, undeniably, unjust, and not in any way like the meritocracies you believe them to be
Not the point of the article (Score:4, Insightful)
Statistically, people who attended college now are more likely to make more money than high school dropouts than was the case in 1987.
Firstly, the point you should have been making if you'd wanted to be at least partially on topic is that there are high school dropouts who make more than people with college degrees.
Secondly, the term "more likely" does not mean that ALL college graduates make more than ALL high school dropouts. Therefore, pointing out that you know high school dropouts who make more than college-educated people should elicit a "yeah, so what" response. Of course that's the case. These are statistics we're discussing, not anecdotes.
The article also doesn't state that people who go to college are smarter than people who drop out of high school. In fact, it attributes the inequity to a number of factors, including school quality, education of parents, upbringing, geographic region, and yes, intelligence. The point really is that on average, from a financial point of view, sucks more to be smart, born to poor parents, and living in a poor area than it does to be dumber, but born to rich parents in a good neighbourhood.
Re:The More Young College Grads I Meet... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, are college grads today really any worse than the counterculture from the 60s/70s? Or Gen X'ers in the 80s/90's? Or pretty much every generation in history (Back through at least the Ancient Greeks, and probably beyond)? It is in our nature to assume that our cohort is the pinnacle of human thought, and all generations before and after had, have, and will have mannerisms that are contrary to what "decent people" should aspire to. Don't blame this generation, your generations was probably just as stupid (and just as reviled) as this one when you were 20.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Perceiving the value of education is important, but all these things point towards motivation. I'll take a motivated engineer or coder any day. You can rapidly tell the difference between those that want life on a platter, and those that want to grab it by the tail hang on, and go for the wild ride.
The armed forces help some get their personal organization together and shows them a lot of variety, but any self-starter has an advantage. Those that want to do a traditional 9-5 or otherwise succumb to being a wage slave don't get very far... and then wonder why.
A key factor is that motivation comes from pursuing a life within a discipline/multidisciplinary pursuits. You have to like, or better still, love what you're doing to be really good at it. And to reap a financial harvest, you have to have at least a bit of business training/experience. But success isn't money. Success is a lot more than simple cash.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Class Difference (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like rationalization to me.
Yes, the most extremely exceptional people succeed without needing credentials of any kind. A highly driven genius doesn't need to prove he's a driven genius to a college professor before attaining success (though it often helps).
For people who aren't that one-in-ten-million person, college is a good bet. I personally have benefited substantially from doing a four-year stint in college. It's helps mediocre joes like me.
Denigrating those 999,999/1,000,000 people as drones shows you are either looking down on us from a position as that 1/1,000,000 people, or looking up at us jealously as one of the people who couldn't get through college himself. Considering you have time to waste on Slashdot, I have my own guess as to which it is.
Re:"The clever shall inherit the earth" (Score:2, Insightful)
Capital generates no wealth. "Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn." Labor creates all wealth. Yes we can be more productive with better technology, but capitalists: private owners, managers, and investors do not create better technology, they only charge us for the "right" to use tools that our class (the engineers, miners, teamsters, fabricators, chemists, programmers, etc) created in the first place!
Moreover, capitalism is highly sub-optimal for creating "wealth" in the form the most advanced technology, best satisfying human needs, and minimizing externality costs. Market demand is all based on short term individual profit. Basic science that benefits all of industry/humanity and takes decades of investment generally needs to be paid for socially, not by through market investment. (Universities, national labs, NASA, the military industrial complex, etc). Human needs are not well satisfied by a system that gives more "votes" to the small class that has the most dollars while letting poor kids go uneducated, sick, and malnourished. Under capitalism, firms have an incentive to externalize as many costs as possible and force third parties to pay for things like pollution, systematic risk (bailouts), etc.
Re:Class Difference (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that this theory of yours suggests that you're an underachiever who is rationalizing his own underachievement as evidence of what a special little snowflake he is, rather than as a character flaw which is actively holding him back in life.
What do you think about this possibility, deep thinker?
Re:A degree is no indicator of cognitive skill (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually all the evidence suggests that the less stratified the society, the healthier it is. You only have to compare the UK to the Nordic countries to see the social (and economic) problems caused by uneven wealth distribution.
Actually, it was down to industrialisation, vast natural resources, and various mechanisms to ensure that everyone benefited from growth and productivity gains. Such mechanisms included high taxes on the rich, worker safety legislation, and strong unions. Not to mention grand government projects to push forward technology and stimulate the economy.
The greatest era of prosperity for the average American was when income distribution was the most equal. Since the taxes were lowered, and the unions smashed, nearly all of the economic gains have accumulated with a small elite, and the American dream is dying a painful, lingering death.
Old Man Rant (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, and that's caused everyone to get college degree, or everyone to get their kids to get those degrees.
It's like everyone is standing on a melting iceberg. The solution is not to keep moving to higher parts of it. Obviously, people are going to do that, and others will fall off and drown, but even if everyone could get higher it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that the damn iceberg is melting and we should probably move back to colder waters.
But, you see, the direction of the country is set by the people at the very top, who are convinced they'll make it to Rio de Janerio before the people paddling the iceberg fall off.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Statistics in the US actually suggest very low social mobility. The percentage chance of a poor person becoming a middle class or rich person is very very low. Likewise movement in the other direction.
The kids are all right (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm a hiring manager in an engineering firm - my experience is that "these kids today" are mostly just fine. While I've hired a few that have been sub-par, by and large they've been hard-working, smart, good employees. Reports of the decline and fall of western civilization are greatly exaggerated.