WordPress is not displaying new posts anymore, so read the latest post here:
It’s time to give the AI doomsaying a rest
This page will continue to be updated with new posts
——————————————————
How America Thrives Despite Blank Slate
I saw this going viral:
When I was in high school, there was a guy one year above me who was on his third year of Algebra 1. He had a private tutor that the school paid for.
One day, I was outside of a classroom where he and his tutor were sitting near the door. She was so tired she looked sick. She…
— hoe_math (@ItIsHoeMath) April 29, 2025
To beat the dead horse, the blank slate is wrong empirically and bad policy. However the rest of the tweet is wrong, in so far as it represents an inaccurate model of the US. When the model is wrong, then it’s time to reassess and revise. He writes:
Anyone who believes in the “blank slate” lie would try to solve this problem by stealing even more money from people who are good at math to pay more tutors to try to force more idiots to do things that their brains cannot do.
This sounds like a zero-sum view of the world, in which resources that ought to go to the smart are shunted/diverted to the dumb/slow. It’s more like, in school, resources are allocated to the slow/dumb because there is nothing else to do with those people, but outside of school or later in education like college and the private sector, smart people have many more options and opportunities to thrive in the US (e.g. lucrative tech jobs, quant jobs, journalism, or academia), so the dire scenario outlined by the author is forestalled.
No one is saying with a strait face that IQ 80-90 kids are going become the next Einstein. Yet some literacy and numeracy is better than nothing, and it’s not like you want those kids on the street doing nothing or causing trouble. So public education basically acts as a makeshift daycare.
If you believe in the blank slate lie, you will always transform a society with a 100-average IQ to a society with a 70-average IQ. You will always re-create the third world.
And yet by almost every metric, in spite of the blank slate, the US is way head and shoulders above the rest of the world. This includes the founding of top tech companies, stock market gains, innovation, real GDP growth, US dollar reserve currency status, and so on. Only China can hold a candle to the US in terms of AI. Japan, Korea, and Europe have nothing close.
It’s more like the rest of the world is becoming more like the third world, but America keeps pulling ahead. This was seen post-2008, and even more so post Covid, when US GDP and stock market gains far outpaced the rest of the world:
The divergence is crazy…it’s not even close. You can see how starting in 2000 that America’s large bet in tech infrastructure really paid off as it diverged from the rest of the developed world.
The US gets some things wrong, but it gets enough things right, such as a private sector and higher education system conducive to growth and thriving, and being a magnet for high-IQ talent from all over the world. Compared to the rest of the developed world, America has less regulation, lower taxes, more R&D, better institutions of higher learning.
Yes, there is DEI and wokeness, but much of the rest of the developed world is woke too or has too much regulation in other ways, such as higher taxes. There is some DEI, but other countries have equivalents and worse bureaucracy. Rather than pledging loyalty to diversity , it’s government overreach, as seen in China for example. Moreover, companies can change, as was seen in 2024 when major tech companies began to unwind their DEI initiatives, likely due to a changing political and cultural landscape, such as bad press and a backlash to wokeness on social media.
America’s ‘smart faction’ has much more autonomy and options compared to the rest of the world, and this is where I think America’s success lies, even though America also has a large, dumb underclass too. All of this is a tailwind for economic growth, that negates the poor policy elsewhere. Thus, the dystopian or dysgenic Idiocracy scenario is forestalled because the smart faction contribute so much.
Another factor is proactive policy elites that will intercede during crisis despite cries of unfairness or ‘meddling with the free market’. Examples include the effective but loathed bank bailouts of 2008 and again in 2020 during Covid, when the US spearheaded massive stimulus packages that aided a quick recovery as the rest of the world struggled for far longer with endless lockdowns and recession. The US learned from its mistake of lockdowns quickly, but China and elsewhere kept trying to contain the virus to no avail, and it hurt their economies.
There is also assortative mating, which is like a soft form of eugenics, in which couples tend to be matched for signifiers or proxies of intelligence, such as educational attainment. This helps mitigate the dysgenic effect of bad policy.
But more can be done. Current policy is suboptimal, which is where I agree. The ‘war on algebra‘ in public schools is one such example of bad policy. I don’t understand why grants, venture capital, and other programs for start-ups and individuals are so paltry. It’s like you need to beg to get $10k-100k from Y Combinator or Thiel, which is a tiny amount of money, when during the ’90s companies got funding much more easily and much more money. There is too much caution and reluctance to help talented individuals and start-ups. So these smart people go to the much more lucrative and safer private sector (e.g. FAMNG+) instead of starting companies or doing theoretical work. A lot of economic growth is being left on the table with such suboptimal policy, in spite of how successful America already is.