Years ago I knew a woman whose father was a baker and whose mother took in sewing. She showed me a picture of the tiny shack she was raised in a small nowhere town in southern Illinois.
As an aside, her father had Al Capone walk into the bakery he worked at in Chicago and buy some pastries. This woman gave me her late father's decrepit '30s watch, which I spent $150 to get fixed to make it worth $75. So now I have a watch that was in Al Capone's presence.
The woman in question barely graduated high school and spent her life being a keypunch operator until her job became obsolete and she was forcibly retired at 50. After that she could never find another job.
Her younger brother, on the other hand, was something else: he was born with an IQ of about 145 and had natural ability at engineering. He ended up getting an M.S. in engineering.
The woman, whose name was Ellen, told me a teacher had told her brother, "You're the student I've been waiting for my entire life."
How he happened I do not know. His entire ancestry was against it. But one thing I do know: what the school district bought their shack to build a school, they got a lot of money and moved into a middle-class house and in a better neighborhood, with a better school.
Whatever talents her brother had came to fruition in a better, middle-class neighborhood. Of course, he was born smart and talented, out of a completely undistinguished and obscure family, yet made the best he could of himself.
Ellen's brother is a perfect example of why the middle-class matters so much. When the middle-class goes, the country is pretty much over.
I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Ellen and her family had stayed in their dying little town living in their shack. Could her brother have made it out? Perhaps, but it would have been a lot harder. A lot harder.
Ellen's entire family was pretty dumb. The father never owned his own bakery and died from lung disease from inhaling decades worth of flour. The mother repaired people's clothing. Based on talent alone, they were nowhere. Ellen went nowhere. The brother went somewhere in a big way, and so did his son.
The same applies to me. My parents were high school dropouts, yet my father became a general contractor and my mother the admitting clerk at the local ER. They had a solid middle-class existence and I was the first in a long line of Tennessee/Kentucky hillbillies to go to college.
My paternal grandfather finished the eighth grade and was a moonshiner. Yet he still was able to lead a middle-class existence. For that matter, his wife took in sewing, using a foot-operated sewing machine.
Eugenics has been in the U.S. for a long time. In fact, the Nazis got their policies from America. It has never done any good and never will.
What we need is more of the middle class, which means even dumb, quarter-ambitious guys should make a lot of money - which is what happened in the past when they could make a good salary slaughtering chickens in a slaughterhouse, which is now done by 85-IQ Mexicans for $10 an hour instead of $20.
The idea that only those with high IQs, who can do STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and other conceptually difficult disciplines, should make a lot of money and everyone else make next-to-nothing, is one of the most dangerous concepts in the United States.
The exporting of our industrial base is only going to impoverish the country, contrary to the hallucinations of the economically ignorant, i.e., Ph.D.s out of Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
If the U.S. ends up stratified with the higher IQ, schooled (not educated) people making good salaries and everyone else with poorly-paid jobs and living on welfare....the the United States will finally be a Third World nation.
For a while, that is, until everything collapses. Which I think will happen by 2030.
And boy, will all the smart ones (sic) be surprised. What that means is that they ain't so smart after all.
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