Links to Consider, 9/3

Charles Murray on identifying STEM potential; Frank Furedi on anti-populism; Rob Henderson on ordinary people; Alice Evans and Daron Acemoglu

Charles Murray writes,

The U.S. has around 130 million people of prime working age: 25 to 54. For any given talent, therefore, about 650,000 are in the top half of the top percentile of ability. That’s a lot of people.

The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young.

If by “young,” he means 18-year-olds, then there are many fewer than 650,000. About 20,000 - 25,000 is more like it.

Murray continues,

The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.

The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence. They use “holistic” admissions algorithms that treat tested cognitive ability as just one of many desirable traits.

Of course, the fair thing to do would be abolish admissions offices, have each college set minimum standards for admission, and select qualified applicants by lottery.

Frank Furedi writes,

movements designated as populists are not simply hostile to the policies of their opponents but also to the cultural values of the elites. It is this direct challenge to values represented as mandatory by the dominant institutions of society that anti-populist commentators find so hard to accept. As the political theorist Margaret Canovan pointed out, unlike other social movements, populism does not merely challenge the holder of power but also ‘elite values’. So, its hostility is also directed at ‘opinion-formers and the media’.

In effect the values espoused by populist movement offer an alternative to the political culture of the elites. It just so happens that of the values of populism resonate with many people in society.

Think of this through the group-status lens. Progressives want to raise their own status, which requires lowering the status of populists. And conversely.

Rob Henderson writes,

Most people are not exceptionally brilliant, or strikingly attractive, creative, athletic, musical, etc. Most people are perfectly average. One goal of a decent society is to ensure that such people can live with dignity and feel valued in their community, regardless of their endowments. Social guardrails used to help with this. Maybe the absence of guardrails—unrestrained freedom—can work if you're a very smart young person from an upper-middle-class family and there aren't a lot of opportunities around you for your life to go in a catastrophic direction. But if you're a teenager in a place like Red Bluff or in other rundown parts of the country, unconstrained freedom will just give you opportunities for your life to unravel.

Alice Evans interviews Daron Acemoglu on the topic of culture as a factor in economics.

He starts out saying,

my approach goes is that humans are distinguished by being extremely flexible. I think that's our evolutionary advantage. That's the secret sauce for many of the things that we have achieved for good or ill. And we do that in a collective form. We depend on each other. We depend on social or collective learning, division of labor, camaraderie and friendship and all of that. So what that means is that we have to be not just flexible individually, but flexible collectively. And to me, culture is the means of achieving that. Meaning that we find ways of creating social meaning that is right for those circumstances using culture.

So it's very different from, say, for example, simple primates, gorillas. You can say they have their culture, they have their social hierarchies and things, but they are largely cast in stone.

It’s a long interview, and Acemoglu comes across as somewhat evasive, but well worth reading.

substacks referenced above: @

Daron Acemoglu, V4.0: Rebooting Culture & Economics!

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The Short End of the Stick

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The Elite’s Hysterical Attack On Populism Explained