Perhaps the assumption that all folks should function independently is simply a myth. Many people with an intellectual disability have fulfilled lives working in supported work settings and blossoming in supported living situations.
This topic is of vital concern if we want to maintain a civilized society. What happens when a not-trivial proportion of people do not have the cognitive ability to support themselves and their families in an economy in which hard work is not enough? We have outsourced or automated much of our manual labor, which is what these people relied on in times past. A strong back and strong work ethic compensated for lesser cognitive ability.
That seemed to me to be the clear takeaway from The Bell Curve when I read it years ago, and the theme was amplified in Coming Apart. Instead of working on possible solutions to the problem these books brought up, we spent our time vilifying the authors as racist and imagining that government welfare and minimum wages would fix it.
Regarding IQ and criminality: I understood that within siblings, the one with the lowest IQ is the most likely to be involved with the criminal justice system.
Regarding the American military and IQ: In his book, and on Youtube, author Hamilton Gregory discusses what was known as Project 100,000, or McNamara's Folly. During the Vietnam war, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lowered the required IQ of draftees in order to get more bodies into the military. The result was tragic and horrific. Many men died because of soldiers who didn't have sufficient intelligence to aviod killing people - and themselves.
Regarding the Flynn Effect: be careful. Flynn himself pointed out that if you went back in time 100 years, adjusting for what is known as the Flynn effect, the average person would not be sufficiently intelligent to understand what was going on at a baseball game. Obviously, not true. So what ever has happened over time with intelligence testing and adjusting for average score, it can't be as simple as 'people are getting smarter.' If it were, my grandparents would have been morons (technically) while starting their families.
This is right on target: truth.....which is why morally depraved democrats will censor and bully anyone raising this issue. And the democrats will lie and slander till they are blue raising psychotic false narratives to avoid discussing this issue.
Old time Progressives had a solution to this problem, it was called Eugenics. Current big government progressives try to solve the problem by creating huge government social services bureaucracies that provide lifetime employment for the middle of the distribution without providing any help to the low end of the distribution.
The instability caused by the cognitive disadvantaged and the subsequent economic disadvantage is due to giving them the political power to demand free stuff. The solution is to reinstitute the poll tax and to let those who claim to care take care of these individuals with their time and their money.
Well, in some of the countries where I work there are men and women sweeping the streets and squares, with pleasing results compared with the filth in our streets. It's not high status work, but there is a certain dignity about helping to keep the city clean, and being paid to do it. We send around a big machine instead, and that misses half the junk. I think we could create many jobs that don't require more than a willingness to work faithfully at a simple task. But we're enamored of labor saving uses of technology, which eliminates many opportunities for unskilled labor.
Expanding on Jordan’s and Glenn’s introductory comments about groups of “losers” who threaten the stability of society and particularly in my mind to our urban areas, I see basically two. The first are the mentally ill drug addicts who constitute the bulk of the homeless population and the second are the increasingly visible roving bands of young Black men who even when not engaged in overtly criminal activity still manage to scare regular citizens and tourists and drive them out of the city’s core area. The tolerance shown to the open use of drugs and public camping by the homeless has basically destroyed the livability of many areas in several west coast cities and the police find themselves helpless in dealing with the borderline and frequently overt criminal behavior of minority youth in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Liberal politicians, especially, appear unwilling to even acknowledge the threat that these two groups pose let alone propose actions to deal with the problems they have created. At the very time that we most need the energy efficiency of high density urban life these two groups threaten to drive people away from our central cities. A solution must be found.
This is undoubtedly going to be an unpopular view, but given the recognition that individuals are unlikely to be able to meaningfully integrate themselves into a modern day technologically advanced society below a certain cognitive threshold, I wonder if as a society we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the possible dysgenic trends of 21st century civilization because of the taboo of eugenics.
We constantly lament the rapid aging of first world countries as younger people have fewer and fewer children and first world population structures increasingly shift towards the elderly. We realize the stress that this potentially places upon future generations as far as supporting systems like Social Security. Yet I see very little analogous discussion of possible dysgenic trends that may also end up stressing our collective safety net in years ahead. Commenter Nathan Robinson glibly asserts that those unable to successfully compete in the modern-day economy should be taken care of by the welfare state, but I wonder if at times we take it for granted just how non-trivial it is to form productive societies that are wealthy enough to be able to take care of the least capable.
Glenn and Jordan talk about the bottom 10 percent in IQ, basically as the left tail analogue to the top 10 percent of the intelligence distribution whom Murray and Herrnstein dub the cognitive elite. I’m very curious about the differential reproductive rates between those two groups today. Given Western society’s sacrosanct belief in the rights of the individual, coupled with our aversion towards anything remotely smacking of eugenics, my guess is that the Chinese will be more likely to adequately tackle the particular concerns that Glenn and Jordan discuss, in large part because their morality would be far more likely to tolerate actions that would be deemed beyond the pale in American society today.
John McWhorter frequently lists long-acting reversible contraception among his top three solutions for improving outcomes in the black community (usually after drug policy and education reform). This need not be a racial issue, however, as Glenn mentions in his introduction here.
I'd like to hear more of Glenn's thoughts on the current homeless epidemic, which, as Peterson confirms, certainly relates to IQ distribution -- as well as mental illness. There is lots of discussion here about making people wards of the state, not an easy subject to broach, particularly when there are racial implications.
This is more or less the central question of manufacturing engineering. You hear about "factories full of robots," but when you visit a 21st century factory there's usually a guy standing next to the robot moving full boxes to the pallet or whatever. I've met people who did jobs like that happily for decades, including a few who are probably sub-80.
The tight labor market is encouraging more innovation here, as every factory is understaffed and desperate for workers.
But the plain fact is there are fewer of those factories, with manufacturing having offshored. Agriculture has mechanised. There are no stables to be cleaned.
The rote, basic jobs that exist today are as likely taken by immigrants, who are not intellectually impaired but don't speak enough English or have the visa status for better jobs.
"What should we do about people who simply lack the cognitive ability to compete in our economy?" Not sure why this is a difficult question. If people have significant cognitive impairments that make it impossible to work, they should be taken care of by the welfare state. Is the argument that existing disability benefits are too stingy and such people are falling through the cracks? If so, then raise them. Is the argument that they need easier access to housing, more services, etc.? If so, provide it. As Peterson gets at, democratic socialist policies are designed to make sure people who cannot compete are still given lives of relative comfort. Other countries have dealt with this problem, I am not sure why it's considered especially tricky.
The solutions you propose have been tried over the last 60 years, to the tune of about 20 trillion dollars. They have been proven ineffective. The Great Society failed. Time to think of something else.
The tricky part comes in when you steal from those who disagree with your socialist policies to fund these programs. The actual solution is for those who claim to care to fund these programs with their money and time.
Kathy, a job is not necessary to gain meaning in one's life. There are many meaningful activities which are not jobs, e.g. looking after a disabled family member or friend. Self-development is also a meaningful activity. Many (if not most) retired people do find meaning in their lives, though only some of them have jobs.
Those examples are jobs, be they volunteer or paid. Providing service to others rather than just entertaining oneself is work, and it dignifies the worker.
Yes, but not all work takes the form of jobs which have to be applied for and from which one can be "fired". Jordan Peterson's client found it very difficult to find and keep a job, though he was able and willing to work.
I don't think they're talking about disability-level lack of cognitive ability. Society's duty of care for its mentally and/or physically impaired is a separate debate.
I think they're talking about regular functional citizens who happen to be cognitively average or just below average, and how society prefers to ignore distinctions in cognitive ability (and shun discussing them) whereas equivalent physical disadvantages are not taboo, which sometimes means they get addressed. Spectacles, makeup, designer clothes, heels and lifts, toupees, etc etc.
Jordan Peterson was talking at length about a man with an estimated IQ of around 80 who had difficulty learning simple things, e.g. how to fold a letter to get it into an envelope. This sounds to me like disability-level of cognitive ability...
It's a problem because it does not follow that a person with a less than 80 IQ *wants* to be "taken care of by the welfare state." In the past there were jobs crucial to society such people could fill. They were important to society. There were autonomous human beings, not wards of the state.
Man does not live by bread alone.
Andrew Yang has discussed truck drivers. A higher IQ range, but the same problem. What happens when they are replaced by automated vehicles?
I think that there are still many jobs crucial to society which people Jordan Peterson sees as "cognitively impaired" can fill. I also think that Peterson hugely overestimates the importance of IQ.
If anything, I think Jordan Peterson (and most people) underestimates the importance of IQ, which is critical not only to job skills, but to foresight, logical thinking vs emotion, decision making in life, avoidance of risk etc
Well, IQ measures only one type of intelligence. IQ tests privilege mathematical intelligence. E.g. the capacity to learn foreign languages can be also seen as a type of intelligence and it does not necessarily correlate with mathematical intelligence.
Moreover, Peterson talks about *estimated* IQ in the case of his client - such "estimates" are unscientific. It would be interesting to find out why this man was Peterson's client - was the "cognitive impairment" his only problem? I don't think so.
IQ measure visual, spatial reasoning, logic, memory and knowledge base. This helps in working out math problems but doesnt actually measure math ability. You also need memory, logic and knowledge to learn languages, so they are not unrelated.
There are many people who have never liked maths and who have never been good at spatial reasoning, but who excel at learning languages, interpreting literary works and writing. There are also mathematically gifted people who don't "get" literature and struggle with learning languages. A mathematically gifted person who hates languages and literature will probably get much higher results on an IQ test than a lover of languages and literature who does not excel at maths. IQ is only one of the possible measures of human intelligence.
And then you get people preventing their kids from learning to read so they can collect a check.
Government program roughly translates to "make this someone else's problem".
Well, government is extraordinarily bad at such things. Extremely, terribly, horribly destructively bad at it. This shouldn't be in any way surprising. There is zero accountability and every incentive to spend as much money as possible. I know someone in the system. He once was high functioning. Years of government "help" ended that. The amount of money spent to enable him to do nothing is staggering. Six figures per year. There are no goals, no thought of improvement, no training, not even taking care of his health. It strictly enables him to rot. And he is not at all an exception.
This is the norm for government social programs. They exist to grow government.
Yes, government "help" can be very destructive and enable people to "rot", as you say - even to slowly drink themselves to death etc. However, it is possible to develop a system which would encourage people to take care of their health, to be active in a meaningful way, to learn new skills etc. Such a system should include employment and volunteering opportunities for people with various disabilities, including cognitive ones.
Finally, people should be encouraged to look after their disabled family members and neighbours and help should be organized above all on the level of local communities.
I know in the UK, it was the labor party who started it, and the Conservative party had to try to reign it in which is why they were seen as the bad guys. It’s funny, it’s like mom and dad: mom is liked in the short term because the kids get what they want instantly, but dad is liked in the long term because he’s teaching about delayed gratification.
Anyway, I think the Conservative party basically said if you want to claim unemployment then you have to go to the office once a week and prove that you’ve spent the week looking for a job. They set up interviews and if you’re not making the effort they cut your money.
I think it’s not perfect, because some genuine cases get cut off and have a hard time, but overall it’s a good start
I get that it sounds plausible and of course no one wants anyone to suffer for an accident of genetics. I used to support such programs. It just doesn't work.
Call it the thermodynamic law of government. All government programs seek a state of minimum accountability (maximum entropy). Programs may start local (low entropy). The incentives are always to remove the funding and management to the most distant, least accountable arm of government available. This benefits both the politicians and those in the various departments. We've seen it play out time and time again.
If there were enough saints around to make such a system work, it wouldn't be needed.
If a government program protects vulnerable people from homelessness and hunger, one can't say that it doesn't work. It is much better to be inactive than to starve or to live under a bridge - and I don't think that we can assume that virtually every person who receives government help is inactive. Let me add that we don't need saints to create programs which reward people for meaningful activity and for looking after their health.
I personally think that psychiatry does much more harm than any government programs because it convinces many people that they will never be able to do any work and that they are doomed to an idle and isolated life.
For one example - Peterson and Loury both mention addiction and acknowledge that addiction treatment programs don't work. It's been proven over and over. Yet those programs continue. Why?
Who's funding those psychiatrists? Largely us through government.
Government social programs are outrageously expensive systems of human destruction. This is not an aberration. It happens again and again and again. It is the result of the fundamental incentives in government.
Think about it. 30,000 people's livelihoods depend on a problem. Will that problem be solved? Not a chance.
I agree with you that when people's livelihoods depend on the persistence of a problem, it creates an extremely toxic situation. This is why it is crucially important to measure the outcomes of programs and policies (as an example, many educational outcomes are measurable and are being measured - the Progress In International Reading Literacy Study http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/pirls-landing.html is a good example).
I don't know if it is true that addiction treatment programs don't work (in what sense one can say that these programs "don't work"?). And I was not talking about such programs - I was talking about programs which provide financial and other assistance to vulnerable people.
You say that "government social programs are outrageously expensive systems of human destruction". Government social programs protect many people from homelessness and hunger. Human beings are destroyed when they don't have enough money to buy nourishing food, when they live in the streets, when they are forced to sell their own bodies to survive.
You talk about the negative psychological impact of government help, but what about people who take their own lives when they are in a desperate economic situation? Government help can corrupt people when it is too generous and when no conditions are attached to it, but it is impossible to imagine a humane society without some form of help for vulnerable people.
As to psychiatry, I am all for abolishing financial incentives to diagnose people with mental illnesses. Thomas Szasz was a brilliant libertarian author who ferociously criticized psychiatry and its power in Western societies.
Its interesting you mention psychiatry, since in at least 50% of the homeless, the problem is severe mental illness, not lack of a home or resources. Note that in the general population, severe mental illness(psychotic disorders and such) is present in 5%, thus it is 10 times as prevalent among those designated and lumped together as "homeless".
The links between homelessness and mental illness are much more complex than you suggest. There are proven links between poverty and serious mental illness - see e.g. this abstract http://repository.uel.ac.uk/item/862zw And homelessness (as well as other distressing experiences) has a negative impact on people's mental health.
"Regardless of mental health status, people who are homeless generally have a history marked by poverty and social disadvantage, including considerable poverty in childhood and lower levels of education, and they are likely to belong to an ethnic minority.... Homelessness in turn has been associated with poorer mental health outcomes and may trigger or exacerbate certain types of disorders." http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/never-ending-loop-homelessness-psychiatric-disorder-and-mortality
I definitely agree with you. I don't know why Jordan Peterson assumes that his cognitively impaired client absolutely must have a job - that not having a job would "kill him". Obviously people need something to do, but it does not have to be a job!
What do you think about the point he raises that maybe the policies which are common in Nordic countries would be trickier to implement in a country as large and diverse as the US?
I have never understood why that would be the case. It is not any more difficult to give disabled people monthly checks if they have different skin tones. Always seems like an excuse to me.
I'm assuming you're reading the other comments. People are referring to paying taxes as stealing. If they don't support 100% of the local, state, and federal budgets, then it's theft. These same people probably donate to their churches and other homogeneous groups. Like JT said, it's a lot more than race.
Also, all ideas do not simply scale up or across cultures.
It has to do with size and cultures, more than race.
I worked for a company with $10M in sales and one with $200M. There are samenesses and differences in anything You wanna compare, right?
In the case of how the offices in these two enterprises worked, there wasn't much similarity. There again: *What* got done was basically the same. Pay people and vendors. Sell. But *how* it got done was totally different.
If You can't see You can't just take one culture and drop it into another.. Work ethic, for one example. You can't just take one system and drop it into another.. It just doesn't work that way in the real world.
I agree with this entirely. This is what the welfare system should be for. Unfortunately, here and in the UK (I know of these two for a fact but I’m sure this applies to other countries) welfare has been cynically encouraged by those in power to tie particular people to government. In the US, welfare specifically targeted blacks and has ruined the black family as a result.
For some, here and in the UK, having kids is a career path, because those young girls know that the state will pay for everything. Their families encourage it in many cases.
A cousin of mine actually had to quit his job because he stupidly had children with 4 different girls, and if he worked then all his money went on child support. When he went on welfare himself, they were all taken care of, including him!
Too many people have abused the system, and when each program fails, they create new ones because they have to keep all those administrators in jobs.
If the welfare system wasn’t abused, and culturally speaking people had more pride in earning an honest days living like they once did, I think we’d have fewer problems, and could easily afford to help those who genuinely need it
There is no evidence that in the US, welfare "specifically targeted blacks". Rather, it seems to me that the social disabilities present in some part of the black population made welfare acceptance necessary and inevitable in comparison to other groups. Asians, for example, demonstrate relatively low use of welfare programs.
You should watch ‘the great American race game’ which features Glenn Loury and Larry elder among others. It shows that blacks were prospering up until the welfare state, and actually in the beginning, employees of the state did target black people. They say that the system incentivized black men leaving their families so that the family would get more money
The system incentivizes ALL men to leave their families, including many whites who do so. Its just a question of why blacks have fallen into this trap proportionally more than other groups. When FDR was considering the early welfare programs in the 1930's, he specifically limited aid to married women with children who lacked support from a husband due to widowhood, abandonment, illness, etc. Johnson extended it to unmarried women, and it was off to the races.
Interesting. That’s definitely not how it’s presented in the documentary. The initial idea sounds more reasonable. As to why blacks fell harder I don’t know, because from what I understand, at that time the average two person headed black household out earned the average two person headed white household. I know the single mother rate amongst whites is high now too, but it’s still nowhere near as high as blacks.
You can definitely point to aspects of urban black culture like hip-hop, and baby-mama, that explain why it continues, but that wouldn’t explain why it started.
Welfare is also broken in the US. It incentivizes not working. When people get a job, they can lose money.
If someone needs help. Give them the help and incentivize them to improve themselves. Give the welfare for x amount of time no strings attached. If they work, they earn more. When they earn more, they also acquire skills and job experience.
If you can find it, read the Moynihan Report on the effects of the so-called Great Society programs. The late Senator, probably the last honest Democrat politician, pulled no punches.
I'm glad you posted this. I've listened to the entire interview three times all the way through. Regarding this clip, it's weird how everyone is so touchy about differences in cognitive ability when so many other advantages are just taken for granted. It's "tough luck" for those who lack those other advantages. A beautiful woman, a tall male, or a handsome Dan, or a great athlete -- all their life journeys are greased by their genetic gifts. And people just accept it and move on. No crying about it. I guess it's because they are observable visually, whereas cognitive ability is not.
You and Jordan touched on it, and Andrew Yang first gained fame by talking about it. ("It" being the idea that there is less and less crucial work for those on the left side of the cognitive curve.) Our society best find some new success touchstones rather than just having wealth and/or job status. Like Jordan mentioned, smart and wealthy people sometimes live miserable existences. There are many paths to joy and contentment; can't our politicians win elections without sowing discord to do so?
I laughed at your reaction to Jordan's, "Do you remember 'The Bell Curve'?" I love Peterson and think he's great, but I suspect he doesn't make for the easiest conversation. He ultimately holds it all together, but the tangential journeys come with regularity!
Just take a hike in a state forest or an inner city, and tell me there is no work that can be done by those with low cognitive skills. Mentally handicapped people have jobs. Should we provide a guaranteed basic income or a job pushing a broom or a rake?
I just spent the afternoon supervision volunteer work in a local food pantry. We had eight volunteers, including two from a town program for those with autism. I can tell you that when I finished I was damn tired from having to run around feeding the two work slowly, while overseeing the others. I'm happy to do it, but it's real work just for those two. Essentially, to hire such people, you have to hire someone with them to take care of them. Who is going to pay for it? Not the companies - they aren't charities. Will you volunteer, or cut a check every month to pay someone else to do it? I'm sorry, but there is no easy answer here, no matter how big hearted you want to think you are.
It all depends on the individuals. My church employs a low IQ guy who does a great job at simple maintenance jobs. He is trained and can do the work without someone looking over his shoulder all the time.
Yes! You just proved my theory that Americans can always solve the problem, somehow. Treating everyone as an individual is really important. Plus, I think people of faith have an even greater call to stand up and solve the problems of the weak and poor.
I am neither warmhearted nor particularly charitable, so good on you for bringing up the truth. Hiring a handicapped person means hiring another whose duty is to supervise the handicapped guy. True that, at least from what I've heard.
We have a local bakery here who hires 99% mentally handicapped employees, and they do a raging good profitable business. I'm going to get an interview with them to see how they do it.
Alan's Artisan Soaps uses two guys with autism in its packaging and distribution department--Alan is one of those guys. It's his Dad's business. I'm going to contact them as well, because nobody is interesting in charity. We're interested in hard work and profitability.
Thanks for the boots on the ground comment. It really helps.
Universal basic income has trade offs. I've flopped on the issue a couple times. There are benefits and costs. Evaluating the costs and benefits becomes a philosophy question.
There are going to be many good natural experiments on the practicality, costs, and benefits of UBIs in the next few years.
I understand where you're coming from but I just don't agree, for two reasons.
First: some of the most important and difficult work in our society is unremunerated. (The two primary examples that come to mind are caring for children, and caring for elderly friends or family members.) I was fortunate to grow up in a part of the country where the cost of living was relatively low, and my family could afford to live comfortably when my mother to quit her job to stay at home with us, her children. For many (maybe most) families, that isn't economically viable — and the family unit suffers as a result. This is, essentially, a conservative argument for some form of UBI: it enables a parent to redirect his or her time and attention to family matters, to schools, to community organizations, which on the whole improve the quality of our society.
Second: I know a number of creative people (dancers, artists, performers, musicians, etc.) who work full-time because they need a job to pay their bills. Their day jobs are in most cases a hindrance to their creative practices — a significant obstacle to achieving what they really want to do with their lives. On the whole, our society would be better served by affording creative people some degree of financial independence to focus on their craft, rather than working full-time to try and sustain an artistic practice on the side.
I think your assumption that if you give Americans $1,000 a month, they'll stop working is false. Some will (and they're probably not working now anyway), but most will want to consume more than $1,000 a month. Poor people aren't going to hid all the money under their beds and keep it out of the economy. Would you quit your job and live off $12,000 a year?
Back to Loury's post. There are people who struggle to find and keep work because they're not cognitively capable of participating in the workforce, assuming Peterson's concern is accurate. A UBI would allow them to survive and or find volunteer or part time work that would be meaningful.
If a meta analysis of UBIs showed little or no changes in employment participation of populations, would you change your mind? If unemployment jumped up or employment participation dropped, I'd strongly discourage UBIs.
As of now, I'm on the fence. But I think it is very likely that UBIs could prove to be a great investment in human capital, even for a large country like the US.
Something else just occurred to me that influences the discussion: I've seen a tendency for otherwise hardworking, independent people to abandon all consideration of "hard" solutions when presented with the "Let guv-mint do the hard work, hon! You pay taxes, let them solve this one!"
At least some of the people making these statements are from high tax, high welfare states like California. They start to sound like the Hebrews in the desert, "we had cucumbers in Egypt!" "We have all these services in California!"
The hint of government largesse is like heroin, cocaine, and free love in one statement.
Excellent info and points. Really excellent. This is a tough one, and one we can surely solve.
America is, and must remain, a very different place from the rest of the world. Meaning: Scandinavia is a high tax welfare region. We could solve our problem by sending all our mentally challenged people to Scandinavia.
The idea that free cash won't influence people to work less is, I believe, in error. But it's certainly open for debate. We agree that any form of UBI is a significant negative and should be used as a last resort.
The trouble with UBIs is this: It used the power of the State to force citizens to pay for stuff FOR OTHER PEOPLE. I think that's wrong, and destructive. And it's not an investment when you steal from other people without their consent.
Investment is for the private sector--I think someone mentioned tax incentives or other government-based incentives for companies to use so they could afford to hire people who cost a lot more than they might provide in service.
:) I think smart, aware, determined Americans can find the best solutions to this. You've just shown me the way.
We're just listing the realities of the situation. I don't feel helpless, and I think we can create great solutions. We need the people with experience working with the cognitively impaired to tell us things that might sound "helpless."
Hey! That's not a bad idea. As long as we can do so without embroiling ourselves in the government in any respect, this is a good thing, a workable idea. The key to this is making sure the energy and execution come from the private sector.
Well, yes. Well said. I think right now profit making business don't have any incentive to hire people who are anything other than "young, strong, handsome/beautiful, big tits."
We can creatively imagine solutions that embrace people with issues, even in a for profit setting. We just need to do it.
Peterson made it very clear that the military can't find a role for individuals with IQs below ~80. Non profits and government can provide meaningful work.
As for pushing brooms, it's possible that there are not enough broom pushing jobs without government intervention. Back to Peterson's point, this issue is being ignored by the left and right.
Great conversation between intellectual giants, although it could have gone deeper. Jordan's entire project is about individual behavior change through his 12 rules for character building. How did this conversation not investigate the potential efficacy of said rules for addressing the social ills Glenn talks about so often? This is worthy of follow-up, especially given Glenn's interest in individual respect and dignity outside of group identity and search for actual solutions to social problems. Also, I wish Jordan had gone into a bit more detail about his own recent struggles with addition after Glenn was so open about his - personal vulnerability when you're generalizing about all humanity throughout history is always a plus. Otherwise, a great listen, please have a follow-up about our individual search for heroic meaning and entanglements with victimhood sometime in the future.
Perhaps the assumption that all folks should function independently is simply a myth. Many people with an intellectual disability have fulfilled lives working in supported work settings and blossoming in supported living situations.
A friend shared this with me. A guy with a 75 IQ sharing part of his story.
https://youtu.be/0Grs_jJ5U6w
This topic is of vital concern if we want to maintain a civilized society. What happens when a not-trivial proportion of people do not have the cognitive ability to support themselves and their families in an economy in which hard work is not enough? We have outsourced or automated much of our manual labor, which is what these people relied on in times past. A strong back and strong work ethic compensated for lesser cognitive ability.
That seemed to me to be the clear takeaway from The Bell Curve when I read it years ago, and the theme was amplified in Coming Apart. Instead of working on possible solutions to the problem these books brought up, we spent our time vilifying the authors as racist and imagining that government welfare and minimum wages would fix it.
Regarding IQ and criminality: I understood that within siblings, the one with the lowest IQ is the most likely to be involved with the criminal justice system.
Regarding the American military and IQ: In his book, and on Youtube, author Hamilton Gregory discusses what was known as Project 100,000, or McNamara's Folly. During the Vietnam war, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lowered the required IQ of draftees in order to get more bodies into the military. The result was tragic and horrific. Many men died because of soldiers who didn't have sufficient intelligence to aviod killing people - and themselves.
Regarding the Flynn Effect: be careful. Flynn himself pointed out that if you went back in time 100 years, adjusting for what is known as the Flynn effect, the average person would not be sufficiently intelligent to understand what was going on at a baseball game. Obviously, not true. So what ever has happened over time with intelligence testing and adjusting for average score, it can't be as simple as 'people are getting smarter.' If it were, my grandparents would have been morons (technically) while starting their families.
Worth noting, the Army requires an ASVAB of 31. This translates roughly to an IQ of 92.
This is right on target: truth.....which is why morally depraved democrats will censor and bully anyone raising this issue. And the democrats will lie and slander till they are blue raising psychotic false narratives to avoid discussing this issue.
Old time Progressives had a solution to this problem, it was called Eugenics. Current big government progressives try to solve the problem by creating huge government social services bureaucracies that provide lifetime employment for the middle of the distribution without providing any help to the low end of the distribution.
Whose job is it to solve this problem?
The instability caused by the cognitive disadvantaged and the subsequent economic disadvantage is due to giving them the political power to demand free stuff. The solution is to reinstitute the poll tax and to let those who claim to care take care of these individuals with their time and their money.
IQ is a taboo subject because many have been conditioned to believe that discussing it is something only eugenicists do.
Well, in some of the countries where I work there are men and women sweeping the streets and squares, with pleasing results compared with the filth in our streets. It's not high status work, but there is a certain dignity about helping to keep the city clean, and being paid to do it. We send around a big machine instead, and that misses half the junk. I think we could create many jobs that don't require more than a willingness to work faithfully at a simple task. But we're enamored of labor saving uses of technology, which eliminates many opportunities for unskilled labor.
Expanding on Jordan’s and Glenn’s introductory comments about groups of “losers” who threaten the stability of society and particularly in my mind to our urban areas, I see basically two. The first are the mentally ill drug addicts who constitute the bulk of the homeless population and the second are the increasingly visible roving bands of young Black men who even when not engaged in overtly criminal activity still manage to scare regular citizens and tourists and drive them out of the city’s core area. The tolerance shown to the open use of drugs and public camping by the homeless has basically destroyed the livability of many areas in several west coast cities and the police find themselves helpless in dealing with the borderline and frequently overt criminal behavior of minority youth in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Liberal politicians, especially, appear unwilling to even acknowledge the threat that these two groups pose let alone propose actions to deal with the problems they have created. At the very time that we most need the energy efficiency of high density urban life these two groups threaten to drive people away from our central cities. A solution must be found.
This is undoubtedly going to be an unpopular view, but given the recognition that individuals are unlikely to be able to meaningfully integrate themselves into a modern day technologically advanced society below a certain cognitive threshold, I wonder if as a society we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the possible dysgenic trends of 21st century civilization because of the taboo of eugenics.
We constantly lament the rapid aging of first world countries as younger people have fewer and fewer children and first world population structures increasingly shift towards the elderly. We realize the stress that this potentially places upon future generations as far as supporting systems like Social Security. Yet I see very little analogous discussion of possible dysgenic trends that may also end up stressing our collective safety net in years ahead. Commenter Nathan Robinson glibly asserts that those unable to successfully compete in the modern-day economy should be taken care of by the welfare state, but I wonder if at times we take it for granted just how non-trivial it is to form productive societies that are wealthy enough to be able to take care of the least capable.
Glenn and Jordan talk about the bottom 10 percent in IQ, basically as the left tail analogue to the top 10 percent of the intelligence distribution whom Murray and Herrnstein dub the cognitive elite. I’m very curious about the differential reproductive rates between those two groups today. Given Western society’s sacrosanct belief in the rights of the individual, coupled with our aversion towards anything remotely smacking of eugenics, my guess is that the Chinese will be more likely to adequately tackle the particular concerns that Glenn and Jordan discuss, in large part because their morality would be far more likely to tolerate actions that would be deemed beyond the pale in American society today.
John McWhorter frequently lists long-acting reversible contraception among his top three solutions for improving outcomes in the black community (usually after drug policy and education reform). This need not be a racial issue, however, as Glenn mentions in his introduction here.
I'd like to hear more of Glenn's thoughts on the current homeless epidemic, which, as Peterson confirms, certainly relates to IQ distribution -- as well as mental illness. There is lots of discussion here about making people wards of the state, not an easy subject to broach, particularly when there are racial implications.
This is more or less the central question of manufacturing engineering. You hear about "factories full of robots," but when you visit a 21st century factory there's usually a guy standing next to the robot moving full boxes to the pallet or whatever. I've met people who did jobs like that happily for decades, including a few who are probably sub-80.
The tight labor market is encouraging more innovation here, as every factory is understaffed and desperate for workers.
But the plain fact is there are fewer of those factories, with manufacturing having offshored. Agriculture has mechanised. There are no stables to be cleaned.
The rote, basic jobs that exist today are as likely taken by immigrants, who are not intellectually impaired but don't speak enough English or have the visa status for better jobs.
"What should we do about people who simply lack the cognitive ability to compete in our economy?" Not sure why this is a difficult question. If people have significant cognitive impairments that make it impossible to work, they should be taken care of by the welfare state. Is the argument that existing disability benefits are too stingy and such people are falling through the cracks? If so, then raise them. Is the argument that they need easier access to housing, more services, etc.? If so, provide it. As Peterson gets at, democratic socialist policies are designed to make sure people who cannot compete are still given lives of relative comfort. Other countries have dealt with this problem, I am not sure why it's considered especially tricky.
The solutions you propose have been tried over the last 60 years, to the tune of about 20 trillion dollars. They have been proven ineffective. The Great Society failed. Time to think of something else.
The tricky part comes in when you steal from those who disagree with your socialist policies to fund these programs. The actual solution is for those who claim to care to fund these programs with their money and time.
Also called charity work, which exists to an extraordinary degree in the US
You first, Nathan. You just volunteered to have me pay for shit I don't want, which is always the "welfare state" solution.
Government is never, ever the solution. It's the answer to "it's somebody else's problem so give them to the government" non-solution.
People are not given lives of relative comfort if we love them, and Peterson never advocated as such.
Peterson knows, as do all thinking people, that humans need work in order to gain meaning in their lives.
It's considered tricky because we're considering real solutions, not communist government.
Kathy, a job is not necessary to gain meaning in one's life. There are many meaningful activities which are not jobs, e.g. looking after a disabled family member or friend. Self-development is also a meaningful activity. Many (if not most) retired people do find meaning in their lives, though only some of them have jobs.
Those examples are jobs, be they volunteer or paid. Providing service to others rather than just entertaining oneself is work, and it dignifies the worker.
Yes, but not all work takes the form of jobs which have to be applied for and from which one can be "fired". Jordan Peterson's client found it very difficult to find and keep a job, though he was able and willing to work.
I don't think they're talking about disability-level lack of cognitive ability. Society's duty of care for its mentally and/or physically impaired is a separate debate.
I think they're talking about regular functional citizens who happen to be cognitively average or just below average, and how society prefers to ignore distinctions in cognitive ability (and shun discussing them) whereas equivalent physical disadvantages are not taboo, which sometimes means they get addressed. Spectacles, makeup, designer clothes, heels and lifts, toupees, etc etc.
Jordan Peterson was talking at length about a man with an estimated IQ of around 80 who had difficulty learning simple things, e.g. how to fold a letter to get it into an envelope. This sounds to me like disability-level of cognitive ability...
It's a problem because it does not follow that a person with a less than 80 IQ *wants* to be "taken care of by the welfare state." In the past there were jobs crucial to society such people could fill. They were important to society. There were autonomous human beings, not wards of the state.
Man does not live by bread alone.
Andrew Yang has discussed truck drivers. A higher IQ range, but the same problem. What happens when they are replaced by automated vehicles?
I think that there are still many jobs crucial to society which people Jordan Peterson sees as "cognitively impaired" can fill. I also think that Peterson hugely overestimates the importance of IQ.
If anything, I think Jordan Peterson (and most people) underestimates the importance of IQ, which is critical not only to job skills, but to foresight, logical thinking vs emotion, decision making in life, avoidance of risk etc
Well, IQ measures only one type of intelligence. IQ tests privilege mathematical intelligence. E.g. the capacity to learn foreign languages can be also seen as a type of intelligence and it does not necessarily correlate with mathematical intelligence.
Moreover, Peterson talks about *estimated* IQ in the case of his client - such "estimates" are unscientific. It would be interesting to find out why this man was Peterson's client - was the "cognitive impairment" his only problem? I don't think so.
IQ measure visual, spatial reasoning, logic, memory and knowledge base. This helps in working out math problems but doesnt actually measure math ability. You also need memory, logic and knowledge to learn languages, so they are not unrelated.
There are many people who have never liked maths and who have never been good at spatial reasoning, but who excel at learning languages, interpreting literary works and writing. There are also mathematically gifted people who don't "get" literature and struggle with learning languages. A mathematically gifted person who hates languages and literature will probably get much higher results on an IQ test than a lover of languages and literature who does not excel at maths. IQ is only one of the possible measures of human intelligence.
And then you get people preventing their kids from learning to read so they can collect a check.
Government program roughly translates to "make this someone else's problem".
Well, government is extraordinarily bad at such things. Extremely, terribly, horribly destructively bad at it. This shouldn't be in any way surprising. There is zero accountability and every incentive to spend as much money as possible. I know someone in the system. He once was high functioning. Years of government "help" ended that. The amount of money spent to enable him to do nothing is staggering. Six figures per year. There are no goals, no thought of improvement, no training, not even taking care of his health. It strictly enables him to rot. And he is not at all an exception.
This is the norm for government social programs. They exist to grow government.
Yes, government "help" can be very destructive and enable people to "rot", as you say - even to slowly drink themselves to death etc. However, it is possible to develop a system which would encourage people to take care of their health, to be active in a meaningful way, to learn new skills etc. Such a system should include employment and volunteering opportunities for people with various disabilities, including cognitive ones.
Finally, people should be encouraged to look after their disabled family members and neighbours and help should be organized above all on the level of local communities.
I know in the UK, it was the labor party who started it, and the Conservative party had to try to reign it in which is why they were seen as the bad guys. It’s funny, it’s like mom and dad: mom is liked in the short term because the kids get what they want instantly, but dad is liked in the long term because he’s teaching about delayed gratification.
Anyway, I think the Conservative party basically said if you want to claim unemployment then you have to go to the office once a week and prove that you’ve spent the week looking for a job. They set up interviews and if you’re not making the effort they cut your money.
I think it’s not perfect, because some genuine cases get cut off and have a hard time, but overall it’s a good start
I get that it sounds plausible and of course no one wants anyone to suffer for an accident of genetics. I used to support such programs. It just doesn't work.
Call it the thermodynamic law of government. All government programs seek a state of minimum accountability (maximum entropy). Programs may start local (low entropy). The incentives are always to remove the funding and management to the most distant, least accountable arm of government available. This benefits both the politicians and those in the various departments. We've seen it play out time and time again.
If there were enough saints around to make such a system work, it wouldn't be needed.
If a government program protects vulnerable people from homelessness and hunger, one can't say that it doesn't work. It is much better to be inactive than to starve or to live under a bridge - and I don't think that we can assume that virtually every person who receives government help is inactive. Let me add that we don't need saints to create programs which reward people for meaningful activity and for looking after their health.
I personally think that psychiatry does much more harm than any government programs because it convinces many people that they will never be able to do any work and that they are doomed to an idle and isolated life.
Where are these successful programs?
For one example - Peterson and Loury both mention addiction and acknowledge that addiction treatment programs don't work. It's been proven over and over. Yet those programs continue. Why?
Who's funding those psychiatrists? Largely us through government.
Government social programs are outrageously expensive systems of human destruction. This is not an aberration. It happens again and again and again. It is the result of the fundamental incentives in government.
Think about it. 30,000 people's livelihoods depend on a problem. Will that problem be solved? Not a chance.
I agree with you that when people's livelihoods depend on the persistence of a problem, it creates an extremely toxic situation. This is why it is crucially important to measure the outcomes of programs and policies (as an example, many educational outcomes are measurable and are being measured - the Progress In International Reading Literacy Study http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/pirls-landing.html is a good example).
I don't know if it is true that addiction treatment programs don't work (in what sense one can say that these programs "don't work"?). And I was not talking about such programs - I was talking about programs which provide financial and other assistance to vulnerable people.
You say that "government social programs are outrageously expensive systems of human destruction". Government social programs protect many people from homelessness and hunger. Human beings are destroyed when they don't have enough money to buy nourishing food, when they live in the streets, when they are forced to sell their own bodies to survive.
You talk about the negative psychological impact of government help, but what about people who take their own lives when they are in a desperate economic situation? Government help can corrupt people when it is too generous and when no conditions are attached to it, but it is impossible to imagine a humane society without some form of help for vulnerable people.
As to psychiatry, I am all for abolishing financial incentives to diagnose people with mental illnesses. Thomas Szasz was a brilliant libertarian author who ferociously criticized psychiatry and its power in Western societies.
Its interesting you mention psychiatry, since in at least 50% of the homeless, the problem is severe mental illness, not lack of a home or resources. Note that in the general population, severe mental illness(psychotic disorders and such) is present in 5%, thus it is 10 times as prevalent among those designated and lumped together as "homeless".
The links between homelessness and mental illness are much more complex than you suggest. There are proven links between poverty and serious mental illness - see e.g. this abstract http://repository.uel.ac.uk/item/862zw And homelessness (as well as other distressing experiences) has a negative impact on people's mental health.
"Regardless of mental health status, people who are homeless generally have a history marked by poverty and social disadvantage, including considerable poverty in childhood and lower levels of education, and they are likely to belong to an ethnic minority.... Homelessness in turn has been associated with poorer mental health outcomes and may trigger or exacerbate certain types of disorders." http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/never-ending-loop-homelessness-psychiatric-disorder-and-mortality
I definitely agree with you. I don't know why Jordan Peterson assumes that his cognitively impaired client absolutely must have a job - that not having a job would "kill him". Obviously people need something to do, but it does not have to be a job!
Getting fired as a volunteer could break him. Having a low IQ was not this guy's only problem.
What do you think about the point he raises that maybe the policies which are common in Nordic countries would be trickier to implement in a country as large and diverse as the US?
I have never understood why that would be the case. It is not any more difficult to give disabled people monthly checks if they have different skin tones. Always seems like an excuse to me.
Nathan,
I'm assuming you're reading the other comments. People are referring to paying taxes as stealing. If they don't support 100% of the local, state, and federal budgets, then it's theft. These same people probably donate to their churches and other homogeneous groups. Like JT said, it's a lot more than race.
Also, all ideas do not simply scale up or across cultures.
Not everything has to do with race, right?
It has to do with size and cultures, more than race.
I worked for a company with $10M in sales and one with $200M. There are samenesses and differences in anything You wanna compare, right?
In the case of how the offices in these two enterprises worked, there wasn't much similarity. There again: *What* got done was basically the same. Pay people and vendors. Sell. But *how* it got done was totally different.
If You can't see You can't just take one culture and drop it into another.. Work ethic, for one example. You can't just take one system and drop it into another.. It just doesn't work that way in the real world.
I agree with this entirely. This is what the welfare system should be for. Unfortunately, here and in the UK (I know of these two for a fact but I’m sure this applies to other countries) welfare has been cynically encouraged by those in power to tie particular people to government. In the US, welfare specifically targeted blacks and has ruined the black family as a result.
For some, here and in the UK, having kids is a career path, because those young girls know that the state will pay for everything. Their families encourage it in many cases.
A cousin of mine actually had to quit his job because he stupidly had children with 4 different girls, and if he worked then all his money went on child support. When he went on welfare himself, they were all taken care of, including him!
Too many people have abused the system, and when each program fails, they create new ones because they have to keep all those administrators in jobs.
If the welfare system wasn’t abused, and culturally speaking people had more pride in earning an honest days living like they once did, I think we’d have fewer problems, and could easily afford to help those who genuinely need it
There is no evidence that in the US, welfare "specifically targeted blacks". Rather, it seems to me that the social disabilities present in some part of the black population made welfare acceptance necessary and inevitable in comparison to other groups. Asians, for example, demonstrate relatively low use of welfare programs.
You should watch ‘the great American race game’ which features Glenn Loury and Larry elder among others. It shows that blacks were prospering up until the welfare state, and actually in the beginning, employees of the state did target black people. They say that the system incentivized black men leaving their families so that the family would get more money
The system incentivizes ALL men to leave their families, including many whites who do so. Its just a question of why blacks have fallen into this trap proportionally more than other groups. When FDR was considering the early welfare programs in the 1930's, he specifically limited aid to married women with children who lacked support from a husband due to widowhood, abandonment, illness, etc. Johnson extended it to unmarried women, and it was off to the races.
Interesting. That’s definitely not how it’s presented in the documentary. The initial idea sounds more reasonable. As to why blacks fell harder I don’t know, because from what I understand, at that time the average two person headed black household out earned the average two person headed white household. I know the single mother rate amongst whites is high now too, but it’s still nowhere near as high as blacks.
You can definitely point to aspects of urban black culture like hip-hop, and baby-mama, that explain why it continues, but that wouldn’t explain why it started.
Welfare is also broken in the US. It incentivizes not working. When people get a job, they can lose money.
If someone needs help. Give them the help and incentivize them to improve themselves. Give the welfare for x amount of time no strings attached. If they work, they earn more. When they earn more, they also acquire skills and job experience.
If you can find it, read the Moynihan Report on the effects of the so-called Great Society programs. The late Senator, probably the last honest Democrat politician, pulled no punches.
I'm glad you posted this. I've listened to the entire interview three times all the way through. Regarding this clip, it's weird how everyone is so touchy about differences in cognitive ability when so many other advantages are just taken for granted. It's "tough luck" for those who lack those other advantages. A beautiful woman, a tall male, or a handsome Dan, or a great athlete -- all their life journeys are greased by their genetic gifts. And people just accept it and move on. No crying about it. I guess it's because they are observable visually, whereas cognitive ability is not.
You and Jordan touched on it, and Andrew Yang first gained fame by talking about it. ("It" being the idea that there is less and less crucial work for those on the left side of the cognitive curve.) Our society best find some new success touchstones rather than just having wealth and/or job status. Like Jordan mentioned, smart and wealthy people sometimes live miserable existences. There are many paths to joy and contentment; can't our politicians win elections without sowing discord to do so?
I laughed at your reaction to Jordan's, "Do you remember 'The Bell Curve'?" I love Peterson and think he's great, but I suspect he doesn't make for the easiest conversation. He ultimately holds it all together, but the tangential journeys come with regularity!
Just take a hike in a state forest or an inner city, and tell me there is no work that can be done by those with low cognitive skills. Mentally handicapped people have jobs. Should we provide a guaranteed basic income or a job pushing a broom or a rake?
I just spent the afternoon supervision volunteer work in a local food pantry. We had eight volunteers, including two from a town program for those with autism. I can tell you that when I finished I was damn tired from having to run around feeding the two work slowly, while overseeing the others. I'm happy to do it, but it's real work just for those two. Essentially, to hire such people, you have to hire someone with them to take care of them. Who is going to pay for it? Not the companies - they aren't charities. Will you volunteer, or cut a check every month to pay someone else to do it? I'm sorry, but there is no easy answer here, no matter how big hearted you want to think you are.
It all depends on the individuals. My church employs a low IQ guy who does a great job at simple maintenance jobs. He is trained and can do the work without someone looking over his shoulder all the time.
What is the IQ of the guy working for NCMaureen's church?
Yes! You just proved my theory that Americans can always solve the problem, somehow. Treating everyone as an individual is really important. Plus, I think people of faith have an even greater call to stand up and solve the problems of the weak and poor.
I am neither warmhearted nor particularly charitable, so good on you for bringing up the truth. Hiring a handicapped person means hiring another whose duty is to supervise the handicapped guy. True that, at least from what I've heard.
We have a local bakery here who hires 99% mentally handicapped employees, and they do a raging good profitable business. I'm going to get an interview with them to see how they do it.
Alan's Artisan Soaps uses two guys with autism in its packaging and distribution department--Alan is one of those guys. It's his Dad's business. I'm going to contact them as well, because nobody is interesting in charity. We're interested in hard work and profitability.
Thanks for the boots on the ground comment. It really helps.
You first on the "... we provide a guaranteed basic income...." Such things destroy people.
We can imagine a solution better than that, this is America.
Universal basic income has trade offs. I've flopped on the issue a couple times. There are benefits and costs. Evaluating the costs and benefits becomes a philosophy question.
There are going to be many good natural experiments on the practicality, costs, and benefits of UBIs in the next few years.
UBI is inhuman and disgusting. It will not be tried. People need WORK.
I understand where you're coming from but I just don't agree, for two reasons.
First: some of the most important and difficult work in our society is unremunerated. (The two primary examples that come to mind are caring for children, and caring for elderly friends or family members.) I was fortunate to grow up in a part of the country where the cost of living was relatively low, and my family could afford to live comfortably when my mother to quit her job to stay at home with us, her children. For many (maybe most) families, that isn't economically viable — and the family unit suffers as a result. This is, essentially, a conservative argument for some form of UBI: it enables a parent to redirect his or her time and attention to family matters, to schools, to community organizations, which on the whole improve the quality of our society.
Second: I know a number of creative people (dancers, artists, performers, musicians, etc.) who work full-time because they need a job to pay their bills. Their day jobs are in most cases a hindrance to their creative practices — a significant obstacle to achieving what they really want to do with their lives. On the whole, our society would be better served by affording creative people some degree of financial independence to focus on their craft, rather than working full-time to try and sustain an artistic practice on the side.
I’m an artist and I reject any notion that the state should support me ever.
Ok. Who gets to decide who gets the cash, and how much?
What does “better served” mean?
Again, who decides?
Kathy, it is literally being studied all over the world, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income_around_the_world. I'm not saying it is a fix all solution. It's trade offs.
I think your assumption that if you give Americans $1,000 a month, they'll stop working is false. Some will (and they're probably not working now anyway), but most will want to consume more than $1,000 a month. Poor people aren't going to hid all the money under their beds and keep it out of the economy. Would you quit your job and live off $12,000 a year?
Back to Loury's post. There are people who struggle to find and keep work because they're not cognitively capable of participating in the workforce, assuming Peterson's concern is accurate. A UBI would allow them to survive and or find volunteer or part time work that would be meaningful.
If a meta analysis of UBIs showed little or no changes in employment participation of populations, would you change your mind? If unemployment jumped up or employment participation dropped, I'd strongly discourage UBIs.
As of now, I'm on the fence. But I think it is very likely that UBIs could prove to be a great investment in human capital, even for a large country like the US.
Something else just occurred to me that influences the discussion: I've seen a tendency for otherwise hardworking, independent people to abandon all consideration of "hard" solutions when presented with the "Let guv-mint do the hard work, hon! You pay taxes, let them solve this one!"
At least some of the people making these statements are from high tax, high welfare states like California. They start to sound like the Hebrews in the desert, "we had cucumbers in Egypt!" "We have all these services in California!"
The hint of government largesse is like heroin, cocaine, and free love in one statement.
Excellent info and points. Really excellent. This is a tough one, and one we can surely solve.
America is, and must remain, a very different place from the rest of the world. Meaning: Scandinavia is a high tax welfare region. We could solve our problem by sending all our mentally challenged people to Scandinavia.
The idea that free cash won't influence people to work less is, I believe, in error. But it's certainly open for debate. We agree that any form of UBI is a significant negative and should be used as a last resort.
The trouble with UBIs is this: It used the power of the State to force citizens to pay for stuff FOR OTHER PEOPLE. I think that's wrong, and destructive. And it's not an investment when you steal from other people without their consent.
Investment is for the private sector--I think someone mentioned tax incentives or other government-based incentives for companies to use so they could afford to hire people who cost a lot more than they might provide in service.
:) I think smart, aware, determined Americans can find the best solutions to this. You've just shown me the way.
With all due respect, I work with many people who have very low IQ's; both students AND their parents sometimes.
Many of them could do simple clean-up jobs, but would require constant supervision in order to do it.
Well said. When we plan to solve the problem, we need to remember that people with special needs need special people to work alongside them.
OK, so supervise them. A job for others.
We need to stop this fueling of helplessness.
We're just listing the realities of the situation. I don't feel helpless, and I think we can create great solutions. We need the people with experience working with the cognitively impaired to tell us things that might sound "helpless."
Our government loves using the tax code to incentivize. Why not a tax break for hiring those less well endowed intellectually?
Hey! That's not a bad idea. As long as we can do so without embroiling ourselves in the government in any respect, this is a good thing, a workable idea. The key to this is making sure the energy and execution come from the private sector.
Well, obviously, no business is going to hire people who have to come with another hired person to make sure they are doing their jobs.
There are non profits and volunteer places that do this, but a profit making business is not the model that will work.
Well, yes. Well said. I think right now profit making business don't have any incentive to hire people who are anything other than "young, strong, handsome/beautiful, big tits."
We can creatively imagine solutions that embrace people with issues, even in a for profit setting. We just need to do it.
OMG, there are always ways to make things work, if you want to.
Peterson made it very clear that the military can't find a role for individuals with IQs below ~80. Non profits and government can provide meaningful work.
As for pushing brooms, it's possible that there are not enough broom pushing jobs without government intervention. Back to Peterson's point, this issue is being ignored by the left and right.
Great conversation between intellectual giants, although it could have gone deeper. Jordan's entire project is about individual behavior change through his 12 rules for character building. How did this conversation not investigate the potential efficacy of said rules for addressing the social ills Glenn talks about so often? This is worthy of follow-up, especially given Glenn's interest in individual respect and dignity outside of group identity and search for actual solutions to social problems. Also, I wish Jordan had gone into a bit more detail about his own recent struggles with addition after Glenn was so open about his - personal vulnerability when you're generalizing about all humanity throughout history is always a plus. Otherwise, a great listen, please have a follow-up about our individual search for heroic meaning and entanglements with victimhood sometime in the future.