Poor kids who do everything right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong
How would you explain then the rise of all these hugely successful web 2.0 companies and their employees, few if any come from wealthy families? I hate to be the bearer of good news, but the meritocracy is alive and well. Even all the Ivy League schools have very generous financial aid programs. The uncomfortable truth is people succeed and fail because of differences in individual intelligence, with less intelligent people tending to remain poor when adjusting for parents wealth.
Also, the graph shows that poor college grads still do better than the rich high school dropouts, so it’s not so bad. 20% of poor college grads join the top 20% vs. 14% of rich high school dropouts. 21% of poor college grads enter the top 60-50% versus just 5% of rich high school dropouts, again another blow to the author’s argument. This author is too blinded by his biases see the contravening evidence, even when it’s right in front of his nose.
Perhaps the government should give no string attached scholarships for only the best and brightest, instead of the system we have now where tax payers help subsidize the higher education of the dull and mediocre, who are also the most likely to dropout.
The Jeffersonian democracy is an inherently democratic idea, that individuals have free will. Biological determinism, a concept which Charles Murry himself supports, means we as individuals have much less control of our fate than many of us may want to believe. This is still compatible with market libertarianism under a federal government of some sort whose purpose is to ensure that in a free market, public resources are allocated most efficiently and to maintain the state of law.
Some argue that biological determinism means we need more social programs to help those who are incapable of helping themselves. Liberals and some republicans alike argue that everyone is capable of anything, if they try hard enough or other environmental factors. Liberals say that people can live to their full potential with more government help; conservatives believe people can thrive with less government. Both of these are wrong because they fail to take into account the biological differences that exist between individuals; consequentially, both sides of the political divide waste inordinate time and resources applying the wrong solutions to long standing problems that are biological in nature. The idea behind market libertarianism is that you combine both of these ideals: let the free market run on its own, but the government exists to help create economic conditions conducive to the creation of wealth, which is essentially the system we have today. But we can take it a step further by cutting resources to those biologically incapable of advancement and diverting those resources to the more biologically able; this would be a more efficacious use of resources. Cut entitlement sending and give the savings to high-IQ immigrants so they can create the next Google or Tesla.
We need less democracy and more free markets. Instead of a constitutional republic we should have a technocracy or a plutocracy. Only people with a certain threshold of Reddit Karma, a sufficiently high IQ, a net worth in the top 1%, more than 5,000 Instagram or Twitter followers, or a STEM degree should be allowed to vote.