>>16750546
hi yes i largely agree but disagree with your conclusions. geography also matters, and income is also a proxy for geography (cost of living, property values &c)
since we're doing the distill-ideas-down thing: have you never wondered if the highest human intellect in all history was simply unlucky enough to be born a, let's say, viet peasant right before they got truck-kun'd by china for a millennium?
you and many others (plenty of others—probably a decent chunk of the us's white aerospace industry whose grandparents grew up with horse-drawn carts to school and who themselves went to fuckass schools like you) made it on sheer headstrong will and personal merit, but also there were many, many of those who made it there because the us took special care with funding the school system because they were afraid they were going to fall behind the reds. reforming curricula (new math, right? the reason americans refer to integers and whole numbers as different things?), the huge spike of university students in the 1960s...
i wouldn't be surprised if the huge education outlay was reason the us pulled so far ahead technology-wise in the 80s and 90s. aegis combat system, m1 abrams, raptor, sts (even if it was gay and killed two crews), b777, the nuclear plant boom—look, i just want to do what clearly worked before
what we're doing now with this wetbacks get quarter-billion-dollar schools and poor whites get 20-year-old textbooks with no covers, women get hired to fortune companies on the power of ovaries, children are helicopter parented and get zero independence, no trains, unlimited illegal immigration, replace americans with poverty waged h-1b workers shit clearly isn't working.
american infrastructure is dying like a bitch, six gorillion regulations lie in the way of new fission plants and lithium mining, tens of thousands of smes in tens of fields are aging out of the workforce. what now?