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"The report also warns against a 'naive meritocracy' which often fails 'to give honors and rewards to the most competent people.' A scholarly paper by economist James Heckman, makes the point that 'personality plays a much bigger role in separating those with high and low income', and found 'financial success was correlated with conscientiousness, a personality trait marked by diligence, perseverance and self-discipline.'"

Truth ends up being the path of least resistance (maintaining lies is a lot of work) and trust a big time/effort saver so a society that exclusively rewards efforting like diligence, perseverance, and self-discipline may paradoxically be selecting against truth-seeking and trust-building.

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Remember the movies with the smart and dumb looser bad guy duos? Being smart and poor is not some new thing! This article is great, but embedded in it was a presumption that high IQ is some kind of value trait. It may be, but may be only on the same level as strong, or tall, or handsome.

As we all know from the same movies, its the guy with the whole package that becomes the hero!

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I forget who said it, but there is a pattern of Third World countries building university systems post-WWII and then having leftist revolutions no long after because there weren't enough jobs for them, the education system expanded faster than the economy.

Didn't know that the Post Office used to soak some of these men up. A solution that might work would be for someone like a Trump to wink-wink promise every qualified man who works for his campaign a federal job. It would kill a few of birds with one stone, including improving from his 2020 campaign's horrendous operation.

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This is brilliant!

I would add an ethics layer. Our economy is completely unethical. Wall Street is predatory, marketing is meaningless, and the biowarfare industrial complex and the military industrial complex are actively killing people. Even if NEETs could fit into mainstream society they would refuse to because it is so deeply immoral.

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This is an excellent article, very interesting. Love this statement - 'The more common archetype for success, is the pro-social extrovert.' Absolutely correct. While high IQ and conscientiousness are key to economic success, at the end of the day the MOST successful are high energy extroverts. In my experience.

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I have been raving for years against the epidemic of fake genius ditzy valley-girl/boy whores from rich families getting jobs over talented autistics. I predicted it would result in the collapse of society and I turned out to be right sooner than expected. I mean these people must have cheated their way through medical school or something if they think that a Pseudouridine substituted mRNA injection is safe. I’m no expert in immunology and even I can tell that such a thing is going to cause immune tolerance and make COVID worse! But these bubble gum brained bimbos don’t even have the level of intuitive thinking to visualize that!

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I’m apart of that class as my father wasted his inheritance

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"Even DSA, seems to be made up of a lot of failed strivers of the professional managerial class rather than the working class."

I'm sure that's true. My very limited experience with the DSA dates back to the late 80s/early 90s...when they were a group consisting, it seemed, almost entirely of (fellow) White guys, all from families with way more money than mine. And one of their main interests, in the sense that it was one of the things you'd invariably discuss if you met them with them, was to further strengthen so-called "affirmative action". It was like joining a group for the express purpose of militating against my ever making any economic gains. It was absurd. Those guys could all just live off their parents' money (or so they imagined...there were probably some rude awakenings in store for a few of those fellows).

This was basically in the post-Dukakis/pre-Clinton interregnum, when the neolibs were replacing the left in all institutions. Even ones that literally had "Socialist" in the name. It was still DLC, all the way down.

Although DSA guys did oppose NAFTA at that time, to their credit.

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