"Society is paying people more for their brains than for their brawn," Vedder said. "The nerds and the wimps and the geeks are ruling the world."
A shocker to find in an article about college grads being attracted to cities that can sustain the interest of the educated, not for its content, but for its particular turn of phrase. Also surprising and not surprising, many cities with a high concentration of college grads have expensive homes (surprising: fresh out of college, one has no money; not surprising: eventually out of college, one makes decent money). San Francisco, with one of the highest concentrations, was the costliest in 2004, with a median home value of $662,000, more than four times the national median of $151,000.
I figured that the half-a-million median home value of my high school days would have gone down with the deflation of the Silicon Valley boom. But IIRC, it's gotten a wee bit higher.
Having been reminded by my cough over the past few days of my mostly sick childhood, I thought again of how I may well not have lived to twenty-three without the help of modern medicine. At least within economic classes able to afford health care, humanity has circumvented survival of the fittest based on physical traits. Where will that leave our physiques in another few centuries (if we don't blow ourselves up first)?
1 comment:
As always, Tiff, you are asking some of the interesting questions.
Your question, btw, isn't exactly new - they brought this one up in the sci-fi of a few decades ago, and it has been repeatedly discussed since.
Related questions discuss how this will all work if career investment/education, and progeny number is actually inversely related. Doonesbury also asked what will happen given that being liberal and having kids seem to be inversely related as well.
Basically, what we see is that an intellectual disease has swept the world, and the people most susceptible to it are the ones who are also most susceptible to acquiring other ideas as well: the educated, liberal classes. At the same time, the ability to pick up new ideas is being heavily selected for in the economy.
But the problem is that one of these ideas that is very successful is the idea that life is about us, here and now. This creates a problem because then, for instance, things that make our life harder or less enjoyable are considered burdens. Things like children. And ironically, access to sex increases with money, but so does access to birth prevention measures, so access to sex and production of progeny are decoupled.
In short, successful people are finding and monopolizing the most attractive mates, maybe for a night, maybe for a lifetime, but they aren't actually getting the payoff promised their bodies by their hormones. They aren't getting children. And they are happy about that at the moment - cause each child reduces their chances to own a fancy car or have a big company named after themselves.
But, now look at who will be the humans of tomorrow. We are learning every day more and more about how healthy children require moms who devote 9 months of relative rest and then a year or more of breast feeding. That emotionally healthy children require fathers who lavish them with time and attention more than money. Basically, good parents are non-competitive in the economy - and people who are competitive in the economy are unsuccessful parents.
This means that unlike in the past, when success and selection worked together, that now we are weeding out the traits we value (I won't say 'good' traits for obvious reasons) and not passing them to the next generation.
Brawn isn't being rewarded in the workplace, but it may just be that dumb jock who married his high school sweetheart and is having trouble paying for the 6 kids' college educations with his job down at the warehouse who will be successful in the eyes of 20,000 years.
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