The military rejects ~23% of applicants due to educational issues. One of the results of this is members of the military are above the average intelligence in the US. But they also reject people with excessive criminal history, significant physical disability, or even extreme weight. Though it’s a sliding scale based on rates of recruitment.
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/02/carson-botches-military-el...
This is putting a civilian-centric filter on the problem. Many, many people chose the military for reasons other than pay. If it were strictly for pay, almost nobody would choose the “harder” military occupations like Marines, or Army infantry, or Navy SEALs etc. Yet those often get more applicants than they have slots.
As for your statistical claim, we’re not really wired to think well about stats so we get erroneous intuitions. To be in the 95th percentile, you’re away from the norm but not as much as you may think, which is the GP’s point. A quick Google search shows 95th percentile for height is 6’2”…it’s tall but not so tall as to actually catch my attention. 95th percentile in IQ is 125, in pay is $248k, in male weight is 246 lbs. Non-normative, sure, but none so far away as to leave someone awestruck
Slow down, that's exactly what I said.
I work for (a) government, and of course I didn't choose to because it paid more than anything else. And I didn't decide not to join the Navy because it paid too little.
What I'm claiming as a general principle is that some people have a huge advantage in opportunity cost for a certain job, and organizations can be seriously affected by concentrating those people together. And we see this all over the place.
Consider the Abu Ghraib scandal. It's not that joining the military entails that sort of thing, or that it's rightly part of the job, but if someone has an affinity for abusing prisoners, then most jobs do not offer the same opportunity. Theoretically, decent people who value doing good should be attracted to jobs that are important and underpaid, but in practice, bad people who value side benefits to an extreme degree may dominate the market of people who will take the job.
I would expect the top (or bottom) 5% of the population in any dimension to be far from the norm.
>Select for decent health, decent intelligence, and decent physical capacity and you can only focus so much on mental health
I think these are wishful thinking, not what is actually selected for. As long as there's no draft, the military does not get to select people. Someone takes the ASVAB, and decides against going further, there's nothing that can be done. People select themselves. The minimum standards weren't that high when I last talked to a recruiter and over the years I've read a lot of articles that suggest they've gotten lower.
The military, like a lot of difficult jobs (police officer, teacher, etc.) doesn't pay proportionally.
So recruits are selected for willingness to put up with that. From an abstract economic perspective, someone who accepts lower than market pay must receive some other form of non-monetary compensation that explains it. It would be nice to attribute it always and only to patriotism, but there are other possibilities, conscious or unconscious, just like a devotion to justice and protecting people is one particular reason for becoming a police officer.
In letting people select themselves for a difficult and low paid job, you will get people who are not near average because they highly value access to things that cannot be found anywhere else, for any amount of money. And they will be concentrated together, changing the character of an organization.
Modern Western culture holds individual freedom, social mobility, and self-direction in such esteem I think we may have a blind spot with regard to how random selection and assignment of people to jobs can sometimes produce better results.