Helping America’s Gifted Poor

In the unending online economics debate that we all find ourselves participating in, this article Telling Poor, Smart Kids That All It Takes Is Hard Work to Be as Successful as Their Wealthy Peers Is a Blatant Lie is going viral on sites like Reddit and 4chan.

That’s why we need more gifted education programs, which still only accounts for a tiny percentage of the total dept. education budget. It’s a shame that America’s most important resource, cognitive capital, is not being used to its full potential.

Here are some solutions I propose:

Creating Optimal Socioeconomic Environments for the Cognitively Exceptional

And:

Some Ideas to Reform Higher Education

Another major hurdle is credentialism

A possible solution is to replace costly, time-consuming college diplomas with cheap, easy to administer IQ-like tests. With the exception of specialized tasks, a college diploma is just an extremely expensive form of signaling, sort of like the equivalent of a high school diploma 30 years ago which since become nearly obsolete in the eyes of employers due to progressive credentialism and grade inflation. One of the purposes of the IQ test , and later the SAT, was to help identify the talented poor/middle class so they could be given the same opportunities as the rich. And now due to political correctness (I’m trying to make this as apolitical as possible), these tests are under attack by the same political party that supposedly wants to help the poor, by either trying to discredit these tests as ‘racist/classist’ or changing the composition of the questions such that the tests are less effective at signalling exceptional talent, as seen with how the SAT has gotten progressively easier with a lower effective score ceiling.