As for leaders who the figurehead is does not matter - ask yourself what do the rulers care more about; who is the POTUS or who is the head of the federal reserve.
The ruling class is both much clever than the past and technology and globalization has allowed their cleverness to result in more control.
In regards the level of control I am most impressed at how subtly it is used. To be able to shift the the share of production from 75% masses / 25% rich to 50% masses / 50% rich in 40 years with barely a peep is truly breathtaking. They have even been able to convince a large section of the population that this is all the fault of people with brown skin.
In regards the rulers have a look at their educational background. In the roles that really matter they are all very clever.
1. https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/britishjournalpsyc...
We're much more on equal footing in terms of ability to gain information. Whether we act on the information is another issue.
If you want to be really clever you just give those smart kids who had a bad school environment bonus marks at the university entrance stage and give full scholarships - say just like the elite universities do right now.
I should mention the aim of the rich is not to maximise production, but their share and status. It does not matter if the pie is smaller as long as the size of your slice is larger.
More fundamentally most very smart people realise that they are outliers and that their children are likely to regress to the mean. While the elite welcome the very clever into their club, they also use their power and status to benefit their not so clever children (e.g. legacy students).
What does a family line which has had uninterrupted, exclusive access to a personal library know?
I mean think about it--what is that family like? That family which has held on to the same chunk of physical space, with books and notebooks, for several generations.
"Equal footing in terms of ability to gain information", my ass!
My own toddler gets confused when he tries to describe his home--probably because he's moved three times in as many years.
I remember the encyclopedias I read as a child. But, I don't have them. I can't review them. I can't consult my notes, nor smell them and get connected to the concrete memory of the day I learned about phases of matter or dry cell batteries.
Those things are important. They change the slope of the playing field.
you cut off the the "more" to make it sound like my statement meant we are equal instead of relatively better than we once were in comparison to the upper class.
then proceeded to provide examples of your toddler being able to retain information and yourself retaining information. both are about memory and ability to recall those memories with accuracy.
Oh, in the first post, my examples are about "ability to gain information [learn]" but you were talking about "ability to gain information [access]". Okay, yes the internet and the public library system are truly wonderful. I do presume that the ruling class (and/or the rich) have some information that is not publicly available, and it's probably very important information, but yes, a poor man can walk into a library today and find treasure laying around. That has improved our footing. :)
Secondly, where's your evidence? Your statement seems to be total conjecture.
I don't agree that assortive mating could do what you suggest as quickly as you're suggesting -- evolution is slower than that. But I agree with the general idea that meritocracy has caused a brain drain from the lower classes, and also that the ruling class is quite clever.
As far as transferring 50% of the middle class's wealth upward without a peep -- this has primarily been accomplished through the "culture war." People will vote against their economic interests if it means voting in favor of their cultural biases.
Is a bit like saying not to study mathematics because you actually need calculus.
I was not suggesting to not study evolutionary biology (we should just call it biology as there is no such thing as non-evolutionary biology), just explaining what is the area you need to study if you want to understand the question being discussed.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=population+genetics+bsc
oh no it isn't
As a unit it often is called something else to appeal more to students and is more often mixed in with other biology fields. This is a general trend across biology where areas that were once separate fields have come back together with the rise of molecular biology.
...
As a unit it often is called something else to appeal more to students and is more often mixed in with other biology fields.
Which is it?
The problem with teaching population genetics is not that it is not important or interesting, but that it involves maths. Biology students and maths are a bit like oil and water.
People said the same thing about George W. Bush. We have yet to see any evidence for that assertion, both for him and Hilton.
>>There are plenty of dumb rich as even with assortative mating your children will be normally distributed, just from a higher mean.
Quite a bold claim. I'd like to see a citation.
GWB got a SAT mark that implies a IQ over 130. While he certainly liked to play the fool for his audience, I saw no evidence that he was stupid, just totally corrupt.
>Quite a bold claim. I'd like to see a citation.
Any trait that has more than a few hundred genes influencing it will be normally distributed with the mean of the offspring the mean of the parents. The genetic component of intelligence is influenced by a few thousand genes so it is not surprising to find that intelligence is normally distributed with the offspring mean the mean of the parents. This is population genetics 101.
One of the more interesting observations about human intelligence is the variation in high intelligence is almost all genetics while low intelligence has a quite large environmental component [1].
Huh? He scored 566 on verbal and 640 on math for a total of 1206 points -- around 140 points below his Yale classmates. I'm not sure how this implies an IQ of over 130, unless you believe that Yale is attended by pure geniuses (hint: it isn't).
Furthermore, both SAT and IQ scores are highly correlated with the quality of education one receives. They don't measure innate intelligence.
But if we still care about IQ, then a 2006 study of presidential IQs estimated Bush's IQ to be around 125, the lowest in any president over the past 50 years, and higher than only three other presidents (Grant, Monroe and Harding). You can read about it if you want [1].
btw, I think you didn't finish editing:
> normally distributed with the mean of the offspring the mean of the parents
> normally distributed with the offspring mean the mean of the parents
What I wrote about the means is correct. Over the population the mean intelligence of the offspring is equal to the mean intelligence of the parents. Of course with individual parents and offspring you can have sets of children where the means are not the same, but averaged over a large group the means are the same.
1. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_154.asp
2. http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/RR-02-04-Dorans.pdf
Edit. This article is rather interesting [3]. I am not sure how much we can draw from SAT marks from along time ago other than GWB was not an idiot nor the smartest person at Yale. No dumb person is going to graduate from Yale even if they are a legacy student.
3. http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/2000/01/bill...
The rich are a lot smarter today than when they were the descendants of feudal landlords - 100 years of meritocracy combined with assortative mating makes for a very clever ruling class.
Edit. Spelling.