Back in the fall of my senior year at the University, one of the fraternity pledges asked me to proof read a paper he had written for one of his classes. Imagine my surprise when I found not one coherent sentence, not one organized thought, and not one statement of hypothesis in the entire four pages. There were all kinds of grammatical errors and run on sentences. The whole thing was a mess. Here was a kid at a university annually rated in the top 50 universities in the United States by U.S. News, and his writing ability couldn’t have been any higher than an elementary school level.
I was required to take a couple of communications classes as a requirement for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I remember the profession in my graduate school class saying that newspapers and television news are written at a sixth grade level of comprehension. Think about that for a minute. Our news is dumbed down to the level of a 12 year old.
Maybe it is the case that by dumbing it down to that level anyone who is roughly one SD below average intelligence or higher can comprehend the drivel that they are fed. But I wonder if any conclusions be drawn regarding the long term future of the highly technical society we live in?
When I was in business school there was much discussion about how the United States (and the rest of the west for that matter) had entered a post-industrial age. No longer were we dependent on manufacturing jobs. We had surpassed this phase and evolved into a service economy. This was touted as a good thing. Now that I have a lot more experience under my belt, I believe that viewpoint to be highly flawed. It seems to me service economies are dependent upon a surplus of wealth in the middle classes to support all these jobs that produce no hard goods. We’ve spent the last 30 plus years pulling forward demand using debt to continue this charade. I don’t see a service economy surviving without surplus wealth, and the phantom demand is no more.
When it comes to the technical jobs needed to support this economy, what have we done? We imported people from India and China to make up for the shortage of people produced by our universities who have the technical skills we need (And yes DA, another consideration would be the fact that some MBAs did the math and figured it is often cheaper and more productive to hire a foreigner than to hire a local, but that process is more recent).
In my darker moods, I begin to think most people in the west have become trained monkeys. They go through the motions of their day to day life. They ascribe positive attributes to the groups they belong, negative ones to those they disagree. The education establishment tells them they are smart and unique all day long, and yet they achieve nothing. They accomplish nothing. I’m thinking it is better to be the organ grinder than it is to be the monkey.
