Everyone is employable at some wage, so I favor eliminating or at least reducing the minimum wage.
Umm. The minimum wage is already below a living wage in many or nearly all places, so I'm not sure what you're advocating here (or are you just trolling, given the glib statement and lack of detail around why this is a good idea?). Are you saying that people with IQs less than 100 should work 80 hours a week and live 4 to a small apartment just so they can pay their rent? That people who suffer from too little income to feed themselves properly should accept their situations because of the circumstances of their births?
There is a huge difference between acknowledging that differences in talent exist and deciding that those who don't meet an arbitrary cutoff should be treated as though they're worthless (or nearly so, given that they'd get paid at least something).
Why is it that, among developed nations, this problem seems to affect mainly the US? Most people in, say, western Europe manage to earn living wages in spite of whatever their IQs might be. Those societies are all doing well and manage to have better schools, medical care, and infrastructure than we do. Our society's ruthlessness doesn't benefit us as a whole nation. Now that I think about it, it's possible that the everyone-must-attend-college idea could be, in part, a response to societal ruthlessness and an extreme me-first/who-cares-about-you attitude we have here in the US.
You make a lot of statements about IQ among races or abilities between genders, to the point where I've begun to see your arguments as being overly simplistic and lacking in thoughtful insight or creative extensions to someone else's ideas. I've read
Real Education and
The Bell Curve and think that both books were written carefully and documented carefully. But that doesn't make them the final word on the subjects they address. It also doesn't mean it's necessary to present the ideas in those books in every third message as though they're easy explanations for a complex question.
As an example of the fact that apparently simple statistics can be nuanced, Ultramarina made a really good counterpoint to one of your claims
here and afterwards. I don't think you can argue that state tests don't test the right end of the bell curve, because the SAT doesn't either.
Val
