Category: Competence

Don’t Ask Why People Are Poor. Ask Why They’re Wealthy.

“Some actually value wealth of knowledge over material wealth, Harper.” – Andromeda

My butler just quit his job here at my stately home.  He said he refused to be ordered around in that manor.

I find it sort of hilarious that economists spend a lot of time fretting about what causes poverty.  I love economics, but often think that they create pocket universes to study that have no real connection to the here and now.  I think that’s called sniffing their own . . . uh . . . emissions.

But sometimes it’s not just economists who ask the wrong question.  As bad as they are, the worst offenders are politicians.  Let’s start with the dumbest question that has been asked in my lifetime (at least in the United States):

“What causes poverty?”

That’s letting Whoopi Goldberg loose in a chocolate factory stupid.  It doesn’t help the chocolate and leaves Whoopi sticky and needing an insulin shot.

But why is that a stupid question?

Because poverty is the dominant condition of humanity everywhere since we didn’t have two rocks to fight over.  People throughout history have been devastatingly, living in mud hut, sleeping in straw beds filled with more bedbugs than straw.  Mary and Joseph had to walk uphill, both ways, to get to the manger.

That’s a joke that keeps you coming back for myrrh.

Only in rare times, and only for a small percentage of the population of the world have some humans felt prosperity.  Fewer still have felt prosperity for most of their lives.  Fewer still experienced enough wealth in their society for them to think that wealth was normal, and poverty was the exception.  We call them Pampered Coastal Elite Leftists.

Why?  Because every farmer in the Midwest, every rancher in the High Plains, and every shrimper in the Gulf (among many, many others) knows how close they are to failure, and how close poverty is, especially if a free-range Whoopi Goldberg is free to eat and trample their crops.

Ma Wilder was impacted by the Depression (she was a lot older than my biological Mom, I was adopted) to the point that, living up on Wilder Mountain she’d save aluminum foil and old pickle jars and have enough food for six months because, “You just never know when you’ll need it.”  It was kinda cute until she made us re-use Q-Tips®.

The Wolf is always at the door.

I couldn’t find the wolf, which I guess makes it a where-wolf.

So, the question to ask isn’t “what makes people poor”.  We can see that as all the systems around us break down like they are now when morons are at the helm.

We should ask the important question:  “What makes us wealthy?”

That’s a much better question to ask, since LBJ’s War on Poverty has just subsidized being poor and created a permanent underclass of voters for Leftists to farm, dependent on the Left for a constant stream of handouts.  If you were late to Leftist language class, that’s their word for “compassion”.

So, what makes us wealthy?  I can only go from history in those places where the world has deviated from the “nasty, brutish, and short” version of life to that “shining city on the hill”.  What matters?

The first thing that comes to mind is Liberty, tempered with Virtue.

When a kangaroo gets hurt, it requires a hop-eration.

Liberty is important, but Virtue tempers Liberty and creates a boundary, otherwise Opium and Fentanyl Den™ would be the new Waffle House®.  Or is that the existing Waffle House© after 2am?

What Liberty does is provides options, for millions of people to make individual decisions on how to better serve fellow citizens.  Virtue means that they shouldn’t destroy their fellow citizens in the process, since that’s generally bad for business.  I guess that cigarette companies have found that it’s okay if you kill them slowly after decades.

Not only that, it’s regulation.  Who loves regulation?  Big companies.  Regulations make it hard for small companies to start, make it hard for them to compete, but increases their profit margin.  I mean, I would have loved to compete with Pfizer® with my “Super Saline Covid Injection” that didn’t cause myocarditis, but they would probably want to make sure mine was entirely WD-40® free.

Which would still likely have been better for people than the mRNA Vaxx.  But who is counting?  Not the CDC®.

What else?

I hear Senator Mitch McConnell stole my rabbit.  Mitch better have my bunny.

Intelligence.  If you ask ChatGPT® about the correlation between intelligence and national prosperity it blows a fuse.  Bing™ chimes right in:  “There is a correlation between IQ and economic prosperity.  A one point increase in IQ is associate with a 4% increase in welfare for the average country.  High IQ is associated with high per-capita GDP and fast economic growth, as well as more equal income distribution.”

Ouch!  That’ a truth bomb that most folks don’t want to hear.  IQ is not really something that anyone can change for the better.  Sure, I can drink a few shots of Jim Beam® and take mine down, but what I’ve got, is what I’ve got, from birth.

But smart people in an economy can keep a more stable economy, and can better grow a complex economy than a group of people who don’t know what vowels are.  Sure, I’d like to think that groups of dumb people could get together and solve the nuclear fusion problem, but I’ve met dumb people – they can’t figure out how to split a restaurant tab without a knife fight then a follow-up sacrifice of a live chicken to Gorto the Destructor god.

Or I could have just said, “Imagine Haiti” and everyone would know what I meant.

Why is Haiti spelled without an “e”?  Simple.  They hate e.

Again, I’m not blaming Haitians for making Haiti, well, Haiti, but if you want to cry, go look over the difference in income between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  I’ll save you the time – the Dominican Republic has nine times the per capita income, despite being on the same exact island.  The data I found (on the ‘net, mind you) has the Dominican Republic has an average IQ of 80.  Haiti has an average IQ of 67.

Haiti has an average intellectual capacity (if this data is correct) at the level where Social Security would consider them disabled (on average).

Having great resources?  That doesn’t appear to help.  It’s the System.  It’s the People.  If Hong Kong and Singapore can create wealth out of zero resources in a location that almost anyone in the United States would consider so crowded they’d have to make an appointment to change their mind, it’s not space, it’s not stuff.

We can change our laws to allow more Liberty and increase Virtue and reverse the trends away from the nonsense of the last fifty years that encourage large corporate growth at the expense of the People.

But if we change out our People?

Who are we?  Will we see the continuation of turning our cities into Haiti on the half shell?

Studies of the genetics of dead Romans (LINK) showed that “intelligence increased from the Neolithic Era (Z= -0.77) to the Iron Age (Z= 0.86), declines after the Republic Period and during the Imperial Period (Z= -0.27).”

Why did Rome fall?  Many reasons.  It lost Liberty, it lost Virtue, and it replaced Romans with people who weren’t Romans.

Wonder if we’ll learn this time around?

The Competence Crisis, Or, Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

Biden was in three states today – confusion, unconsciousness, and disorientation.

I’ve written about Idiocracy before. It’s a good movie, and Mike Judge has a great sense of humor and timing. I would probably pay money to listen to him to read his phone list in Butthead’s voice. Unless Disney® got the money.

Anyway, Idiocracy was a funny movie. Unfortunately, it has proven to be prophetic in more ways than one. Recently, and article is making the rounds on /places/ about the topic of Idiocracy titled Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis (LINK). It’s by Harold Robertson, who I assume is not related to Robert Haroldson.

His bio on Palladium lists him as an “asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital”. That makes me think he’s totally using a made up name or has all the money he can eat, since the thing he says in the article are so against The Narrative.

There are some difficult truths there. First, no matter how much everyone would like unexceptional people to be able to perform at exceptional levels, it’s simply not the case that that can happen. One of my favorite stories of Lee Iacocca was about his first day leading Chrysler®. Like most folks, on their first day, he was shown his office. Unlike most folks on their first day, he was informed that he had a personal chef, and he should request what he’d like to have for lunch.

Lee said, “Oh, I dunno. How about a hamburger?”

When you’re the boss, you can have a hamburger.

The hamburger was delivered, right on time. Iacocca took a bite. It was the very best hamburger that he had ever had in his life. He requested to talk to the chef. “This was the best hamburger that I’ve ever had. How did you do it?” The chef smiled, pulled a ribeye out of the fridge, and put it into the meat grinder.

It’s silly that people have been turning plants into burgers. Cows have been doing that forever.

I love that story. What you get depends on what you start with. Sure, you could grind up an old catcher’s mitt or that opossum that roots around in the garbage and cook it into a burger, but it wouldn’t be great chow.

The material that you start with determines the end results.

In that article by Harold Robertson, he discusses a point I’ve been trying to make for years here – complex systems and societies are exceptionally fragile things – the more complex, the more fragile. Civilization is a house of cards – it takes millions of people doing their jobs exceptionally well every day just to keep it going.

It’s like the Red Queen and Alice from Through the Looking Glass.

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Someone told me I should stop drinking, but then realized I shouldn’t listen to some drunk who talks to himself.

The people running the complex systems we depend upon every day have to run, looking out and maintaining just what we have installed to make it work. Miss a scheduled maintenance? An entire city can have a power outage.

An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant past.

Can’t happen here? What about California with the nearly annual cascading power outages? What about the city of Jackson, Mississippi being mis-managed to the point of collapse? What about Flint, Michigan, making the water acidic and leaching the lead out of the pipes? Or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?

None of these technologies are under 100 years old. Sure, there have been advances in the way that they are done, but trains have been around longer than your mom, and clean drinking water has been around every since we figured out that we should keep the lepers with typhoid away from the wells.

I started growing herbs because I heard that thyme is money.

As the article notes, for a long time in the 20th century there was a relatively ruthless winnowing process in life for competence and intelligence. The young men who ran NASA in the 1960s were young, sure, but also amazingly competent. Gene Kranz, the “failure is not an option” guy, was only 35 when he was the Chief Flight Director for Apollo 11. The “Kranz Dictum” is simple: Tough and competent.

That was another time. Tough is replaced with Trigger Warnings and Competent is replaced with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

Now we find ourselves in Idiocracy. Promotions aren’t based on competence, they’re based on . . . other factors. The armed forces of the United States, for instance, is top-heavy in white men. That is, people who were actually born men.

Since there are too many of them, regardless of competence, the new officers that will be promoted will be promoted by criteria other than competence. This is why I advised both The Boy and Pugsley to avoid .mil. Incompetence at a Pizza Hut® ends up with really crappy pizza delivered poorly. Incompetence in the military results in everyone being killed. The use of low IQ troops in Vietnam (at the time called the “Moron Corps”) resulted in triple the death rate, despite what Forrest Gump might indicate.

We’re now doing the very same thing. We’re pulling the spark plugs from the engine, and wondering why it doesn’t run. Don’t believe me?

Looks like there’s no IQ test to get into Congress.

Look at Fetterman or Feinstein, who have the mental function of a three- or four-year-old. Yet? They’re Senators. Look at AOC, who thinks that, if Congress passes a law that defies the law of physics, like making electric cars mandatory, that water will run uphill, dropped plates will unbreak themselves, and everyone will have prosperity.

Competence is crucial to our way of life, and it is, sadly, not evenly distributed. I won’t opine as to why, because I don’t know why. But to doom civilization because the idea that competence and intelligence can be created because we really, really, really, want competence to be there?

That’s Idiocracy in action.