America is becoming smarter and dumber at the same time

I saw this going massively viral

The common theme is that America is dumbing-down. Instead, it’s more like America is becoming smarter and dumber at the same time, and delaminating culturally. On one extreme: America leads the world in cutting-edge SOTA AI research. Or tech and finance. Space-X and Tesla have no foreign equivalents. Same for leading tech companies, university rankings, or academic publishing: four of the top five math journals are all in the U.S. But on the other extreme: large swaths of people whose economic value is effectively zero if not for passive consumption. Alluding to Charles Murray, Paul Fussell, and David Brooks, the bottom half continue to pull away from the top 5-10%, and for all practical purposes represent a distinct cultural tribe that happen to coexist within the same geography.

The media often focuses on the bottom half–those who struggle to learn algebra or have otherwise disengaged–while overlooking how intensely optimized, credentialed, and overprepared the top 5 percent have become. This imbalance in coverage obscures reality: although there may be signs of declining performance among lower-performing/low-IQ groups, the top tier of society is becoming increasingly productive and pulling further ahead. The productivity of the top effectively negates the “dumbing down” narrative so often attached to the bottom half.

When the media bemoan “today’s generation” as incompetent, dumbed-down, or coddled–it was arguably worse generations ago. Standards were lower in almost all respects, and things were much easier. Instead of “remedial college algebra,” those people simply did not go to college. So it’s not that college has gotten much worse, but now colleges must accommodate all these dullards who don’t know basic math, as expectations have been placed on them to attend.

American life has possibly become too hard due to more competition and higher standards. As discussed in my August 2025 post, “Why everything has gotten harder,” it’s hard to think of examples where I can point to things being easier. This is true of professional sports, publishing a paper, getting a tech job, being awarded tenure, or applying to a top college. This is related to the ‘elite overproduction hypothesis’. There are simply too many qualified people vying for too few slots, leading to disillusionment, discontent, and anxiety.

Today’s ambitious teens and 20-30-somethings have more competition than ever, whether it’s higher standards or foreign competition. For example, completing calculus in high school used to be impressive; now it’s pedestrian. Now, good placing in math competitions, which are far harder, are required to distinguish oneself from the masses. Some high schoolers have gone so far as to try to publish original research (so-called ‘independent research projects’, although they are often guided by a mentor and not truly a solo endeavor), which would have been unheard of decades ago. The same is true of the white-collar job market, such as hyper-competitive tech or finance jobs, where passing the all-important phone interview, let alone getting a callback, is a rite of passage.

For the above reasons, if today’s ambitious, high-performing young people were dropped into the 1950s-70s–the era pundits often romanticize as a lost age of American greatness–they would likely outperform their peers by a wide margin, who were not taking calculus in high school. So I would submit that the problem is not so much that America lacks talent or cognitive capital, but that a lot of this talent is unrewarded, squandered or unidentified, such as endless careerism or credentialism, while coexisting with large segments of low productivity.