THE SLOW, EXCRUCIATING, DISASTEROUS DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA
Austin is a more pleasant place to live than Dallas because people are smarter on average.
This does not mean there are not smart people in Dallas. There are. What it does mean is the typical Austinite is just a little sharper.
This makes for more pleasant conversations. It’s easier to get complicated things done. And despite its lower population it more easily sustains intellectual activities which makes for a vibrant innovative community.
The entire USA is slowly moving away from that right now and it is a SERIOUS problem, made even worse by NO ONE TALKING ABOUT IT.
We are getting dumber every year and today it's okay and next year it should be okay too, but in 5 years, and in 10 years, and in 20 years we are going to regret that we didn't act today to fix this problem, because we will be surrounded by young idiots.
This is a much more serious problem than climate change (which we do talk about). Human ingenuity invented air conditioning. We can solve climate change. There is no good solution for everyone around you being too dumb to follow directions (sorry, AI will not save us). It will make our future lives not only economically poorer, but all around less pleasant.
Here's what's happening:
1. We are letting literally millions of people into the country illegally. They are not university professors, rocket scientists, and STEM grads. They are poorly educated. If they weren't, they'd come legally or stay in their home countries because they'd have decent jobs.
2. Smart people are not having kids in America. Uneducated people who make bad decisions are. I have a warehouse and I have to hire for it, both full-time and temporary jobs. The temps regularly have 6+ kids with 2-3 baby mamas (mothers of their children). These are people who cannot hold full-time jobs; they're good people, some of them are smart (some are disturbingly dumb), but if they are smart they don't have their shit together and when you don't have your shit together, you are not going to be a good father. It takes 2 parents (if not a whole village) to raise a child. The 6+ kids on 2-3 baby mamas become dumb, incompetent, or worse, criminal, adults.
3. Whether its the children of illegal immigrants or the 6+ fatherless kids, we are not educating these children. Until 2012, US students were getting better and better at math and reading. Since, they've gotten worse every year, and took a massive nosedive in 2023 (3 years, not 2 or 1 year, after the pandemic which closed schools). Look at this post from the teachers subreddit. It's not a debate as to whether or not kids are getting dumber. It's a generally accepted fact. The question is when it started and what caused it! For the richest country in the world, that is absurd. It is an embarrassment.
The young people of this country are its future and when they are getting dumber every year, the future of this country is fucked.
So we've got to fix it.
Here are 4 things we can do, some which are actually politically possible to achieve.
A. Start talking about it. No one is going to cancel you for saying that American public k-12 education is bad and getting worse. Forget climate change and foreign wars; this is existential threat to America's future.
B. Start enforcing immigration laws at our Southern border. If we want to continue to let people into this country, that's okay too, but admit people based on merit (achievement in science, technology, engineering, math), not whether they paid a human smuggler to have them trek through Mexico.
C. Stop incentivizing bad behavior. We pay single mothers more money than we pay two income couples. This leads to a situation where moms dont' want to get married because they'll lose their benefits and dads want to work under the table because they'll lose their money to child support. This is horrible for children.
D. The US education system is a disaster. It spends huge amounts of money per student and gets horrible results. Let's ban cell phones from public schools. It won't fix everything, but it's a start and hopefully if people see how kids are better educated without the distraction of cell phones, we can start making other necessary changes to improve US education.
Man, writing A through D makes me depressed because I'm worried we can't pull it off, but we've got to try, because if we don't, our future is fucked.
If you care, if you think I'm right (I am right), please comment and share (this article first appeared on Twitter/X). This needs to be our national conversation, not what we see and hear in the news.
Thank you.
