Mission Accomplished — NOT
A new paper on poverty makes it clear that declaring mission accomplished isn’t a conservative governing mistake — it’s a way of life:
If a modern wage can purchase no more food than wages from 400 years ago, something has clearly gone wrong, even if there have been gains in medical care or information technology.
What’s more it’s a systemic problem with any society where some grow powerful enough:
Capitalism is not the only mode of social organization to have historically induced subsistence crises. Figure 5 suggests that European feudalism culminated in an episode of extreme poverty. Data on wages in 4th century Ancient Rome suggests labourers working 250 days a year lived in extreme poverty, with a welfare ratio of 0.83 or less (Allen, 2009, Scheidel, 2010). This is consistent with Koepke and Baten’s finding that human height in the Roman Empire was substantially lower than in other times and places, which they speculate may be due to high inequality, a lack of public services, and the commercialization of Roman agriculture (Koepke & Baten, 2005, pp. 86–87). Even in Maoist China — where pro-poor policies significantly reduced deprivation following the revolution — dictatorship and press-censorship caused millions to die in the famine of 1958–61 (Dreze & Sen, 1989, pp. 210–215). Capitalism is not unique in producing poverty; poverty may result from any system where an underclass lacks political and economic power. It is clear however that the expansion of the capitalist world-system caused a dramatic and prolonged process of impoverishment on a scale unparalleled in recorded history.
The reality is that the mission was accomplished — just not the mission that was advertised. From a conservative point of view the real mission for most of governance is punishment of the wicked.
Underlying conservative dogma is based on two propositions:
- Some humans are inferior to others.
- A less punitive economic system encourages a worse humanity.
The original sin for 1. is our education system — one that, like it or not, can pretty much only be used to draw pseudo-scientific conclusions:
The user was referring to a GWAS published about six weeks earlier in the journal Nature Genetics, by a broad international collaboration of scientists. The study sought to identify alleles linked not with intelligence, per se, but with educational attainment — the number of years of school a person completed — and what the authors identified as proxies for cognitive ability, including an individual’s performance on a vocabulary test, their self-rated math ability, and the highest level math they’d completed. Altogether, the team identified 1,271 alleles associated with educational attainment, and several hundred associated with performance on cognitive and academic achievement tests. From those alleles, the group derived polygenic scores that could account for between 11 and 13 percent of the variation they observed in educational attainment, and between 7 and 10 percent of the variation in cognitive performance.
The GWAS was conducted on a population of European genetic ancestry, and when the researchers applied their polygenic score for educational attainment to people of African American ancestry, the predictive power plummeted, a potential casualty of the portability problem. Nevertheless, anticipating that their work might be misinterpreted by the public, the researchers published a 27-page FAQ to go along with the study, spelling out in no uncertain terms why it would be meaningless to use their results to try to make racial comparisons.
Lying about academic achievements can only lead to misanthropic ends. If there are “winners” in education then there must be “losers” and so proposition 1. becomes inevitable.
That’s not to say that there is anything wrong with being well-learned. The problem comes from claiming a system that can both induce learning as well as measure learning to a fine degree. Once we lie about having those capabilities then pseudo-scientifically measuring broad swaths of humans as inferior cannot be stopped.
The current education system is a triumph over any kind of caste / nobility system but it’s not good enough to declare mission accomplished. But not wanting to bite the academic hand that feeds them most progressive political discourse argues against proposition 2.
Unfortunately drawing the battle lines past proposition 1 is a losing strategy. If some humans are inferior then diversity beyond the superior humans is some kind of unfinished evolution. But diversity is the strength of humanity— not a defect.
Imagine a congregation of Olympic runners of all categories, 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 1500m, 3000m steeplechase, 5000m, 10000m, and marathon. Every event could easily have a different winner declaring superiority. Of course education has different fields of study but it mostly has only one way of pseudo-scientifically measuring it’s pretend mastery.
Nor is the economic system that students graduate into any better at judging which forms of diversity are preferred. Comparison to evolutionary forces for these systems are preposterous as humans cannot currently nor historically individually accomplish anything. Individual scores cannot be assigned and any group score for humanity loses meaning as soon as we are no longer interested in increasing our population.
So arguing, “Yes they are inferior but we should treat them as equals.” causes more damage then it prevents. “They” are NOT inferior and that’s why we treat them as equals is the only reasonable approach.