The US, at least, seems to be past peak intellectual labor. Somewhere between 30% - 60% of people with STEM degrees don't work in jobs that need them.[1] Bloomberg has worse numbers for degrees generally.[2] "A quarter of grads over the age of 25 make less than $35,000 a year, with many close to the poverty level."

It's entirely possible that the economic reward for intelligence is decreasing. Up until 1920 or so, what employers wanted was physical robustness and reliability. There was a period when intelligence was prized, probably beginning post-WWII. That may be over.

Amazon's fulfillment operations represent today's corporate ideal - "Machines should think, people should work." They want physical robustness and reliability in their employees. Not original thinking.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/2024/02/09/few-st...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-18/is-colleg...

I disagree with this take. There are so many variables like job availability in area where person wants to live, graduation does not mean one is fit for job, job openings are for experienced positions and openings for recent grads are almost non existent.

If there are only openings for experienced people, as a recent grad you take whatever else you can find. Then people just get stuck in whatever they got as first job because they get experience there and get value.

It also doesn’t say what STEM people end up with - I bet a lot is clerical job and not moving boxes for Amazon or flipping burgers.

A lot of STEM jobs are bullshit. Intellectual grunt work. Most people are fixing other peoples bugs rather than building anything innovative. And a lot of the "innovation" in tech over the last years has been a rehash of ideas from the 60s.

Fixing bugs is useful work. A bias against boring maintenance toward innovation is how you end up with crumbling infrastructure.

Fixing bugs is useful, but if that's all someone does, that usually means the company's development process is bad. The developer of code should be ensuring it's bug-free, along with the rest of their team (i.e. code reviews, unit testing, system testing, etc.), not committing a bunch of crap to master and then expecting others to fix all their bugs.

> Most people are fixing other peoples bugs rather than building anything innovative.

And you need the former to support the latter. That's one of the points of the article.

The world population was 2.5 billion in 1950, which is usually the time people mean with post WW2.

I'd argue that we're not exactly beyond peak intellectual labor, we've just got 8+x as many workers vying for these jobs (for multiple reasons)

> The amount of thinking happening in the world depends on the amount of human brains available, and their level of education and knowledge

It seems to me that most of today's high impact "minds" come from relatively wealthy families compared to the world's average. They come from a small pool of candidates, compared to the vast world population as a whole that don't have the same opportunities. We basically throw away potential geniuses.

If we reduced poverty, corruption and made higher education available for everyone we would increase that pool by billions of people.

We don't need more people in the world - what we need is to give those that are already here the opportunity to nurture their minds.

Wealthy families mean you are able to take risks with your ideas, while the rest of us need to play it safer if we want to pay our rent.

Is there any possible correlation between high rents and high population?

Possible, but you'd still have to prove it.

After all, buildings and higher density is possible, transit is possible.

Where I live (sao paulo) there are many people on the streets. However, there is housing for all of them. That just lies empty. For speculation and seeking higher rents. For airbnb and skirting renters protection laws.

We don't have too much people, we have capital that is too accumulated at the top and that expects too high returns

Agree up to the last paragraph

In the genius funnel, the article argues to increase intake, you are arguing to enlarge the 'goes to school' step.

Porque no los dos?

And the amount of productive thinking is depending on the fraction of the total sum that goes into zero sum games like advertising and finance. No, I'm not saying that those don't have any utility, they do, but that utility has a clear "good enough" limit and more brains trying to maximise their piece of the pie does not make the pie any bigger.

Advertising aside, finance definitely isn't zero-sum.