But it's important to still have a separate track for the best students. Those will grow up to do the important work and move the society forward. If you put them into a mediocre class it will waste their potential.
Peter Turchin has developed a mathematical model to predict the collapse of a society and one of the main factors is an over-supply of graduates (or elites). Adding to it the dynamics of AI and smart robots, the effect of over-supply can be only exacerbated further.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/us-societa...
-It’s a probabilistic model, so it only predicts the odd of a collapse
- Their main contribution was the creation and curation of a super detailed historical database: the Seshat. It spans almost 10000 years of human history with more than 400 polities from 30 regions around the world, using over 1,500 variables. Based on this data, Turchin & al devised the mathematical model for the prediction.
- One key area is to find surrogate data when others are not available. For ex. body size could be used to describe the nutrition and economic situation of the population.
- In 2010, Nature asked experts and super-forecasters for their prediction of 2020. Only Turchin predicted the coming collapse of America.
That is - you've created a large class of intelligent achievers with nothing for them to do. Arguably that just naturally produces increasing societal upheaval. Whether that means revolution or just chaotic increasingly populist elections is a matter of degrees.
This doesn’t quite resonate with me, because I’ve lived through it and seen it happen over and over again even in the most functional of societies.
Oversimplifying a bit, let’s call intelligent achievers elites. There is often a mismatch between elite supply and elite slots, and by definition elite slots are scarce — no matter how well your society is functioning.
Elite slots scale with the maturity and breadth of the economy. The U.S., with its size and diversity, has a much larger pool of elite slots than most countries. That’s one reason I moved here.
By contrast, in Canada (a country I love deeply), most Ph.D.s end up underemployed or they leave, because their skills simply aren’t needed at the level of specialization they were trained for. Some jobs only make sense when you have enough scale to support them — and without that scale, those elite positions just don’t exist.
Can intelligent achievers pivot to something else, like entrepreneurship? Sure, but in a smaller economy, the options are much more limited, even if they do a startup and invent new categories. They can also accept underemployment. There are inherent constraints in an economy due to natural factors like scale, geography, etc.
(My understanding is that Taiwan is in this situation -- highly educated people, limited industries that can employ them. Some move abroad, but many just curb their ambitions and try to get by with low pay and accept their lot in life, striving only for "little joys" they can afford like bubble tea and inexpensive street food)
English gentry, New England merchants, nobles of the robe, army officers, etc.
Only the Russian revolution would involve people who were nobodies before it, but they took charge after the disaffected elites that came to power in February spend most of 1917 undermining each other.
The latter would have undoubtedly faced a revolution if Britain had no elections. Later, she'd go on to become an invincible electoral juggernaut.
I know i will get downvoted for this but i feel HN is losing its intellectual side over such elitist crap. The original article is from a well-known racist / eugenist and people here keep going on posting more dubious content that tries to paint towards political policies to keep the masses out of higher education.
OTOH I am very impressed with how Volodymir Zelenski turned out. Who would have thought?
He played his cards so well that Ukraine now has 100k dead people, another 300k injured, so much destroyed infrastructure and so many cities turned into battlegrounds. Yes, "impressive".
I am not saying he's to "blame" for this, but being "very impressed" is weird to me as well — whether it was possible to play the fine line between sovereignty and compromise I don't know, but I can certainly see less costly middle ground.
What would have impressed me was to have gotten Ukraine into EU, yet committed not to join the NATO and figured out a "neutral combat zone" for Eastern Ukraine — keep both Ukraine people and Russia happy, for instance.
That solution flies in the face of the real world reality.
Educated voters are manipulated as well, it is just a different kind of manipulation, and in many countries they represent a small part of the electorate.
I went to school in a small town where I still shared some non-core classes with the masses, and only had separate tracks for some science/math courses starting at say 13 or 14 years old. But I still had gym/art/homeroom/etc with the masses right until graduation at 18 years old.
The trend has of course been to split the smarter kids out at younger and younger ages.. you see completely separate smart kids schools starting at 14 or 11 years old. You hear stories of pre-K and kindergarten programs that require your kid test in, as if they can asses the intelligence of a 3 year old.
As a society I would observe it makes the masses more resentful & distrusting towards "the elites" and "the elites" more oblivious to what the life for 99% of the country actually entails.
Both of those can add tons of societies (or avoid their downfall), but all of them have 1 in common - they are spoiled rich kids with 0 connection to lives of ordinary folks from Day 1. One of biggest tricks Trump pulled was convincing folks he is one of them, and understands and shares their plight.
So it seems we are already getting at least aome brilliant folks up where they belong, and lower rate of those ain't outright catastrophe for aociety. On the other hand - dumb trivial to manipulate general population can't be saved by producing more smart brilliant folks, populistic corrupt a-holes will still overcome them.
So I would focus on general education level much more, based on above. General prosperity over future trillionaires.