https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1463235285760688129What makes this mindset even stranger is that it is the complete opposite of the American attitude to every other facet of life: that everyone can be successful if they just "work hard" and stop being lazy and demanding handouts so if you're not rich you have no excuse.
The evidence suggests that everyone can be above the poverty line if they work a steady job and don't commit one of a pretty small number of errors (basically not taking out enormous debt or having a child with someone who won't help you raise the child)...
But the evidence doesn't really suggest that working hard can result in better educational outcomes for all but very a small number of people; for example, contrary to the criticism, expensive tutoring helps very, very few people on standardized tests. Most see no improvement. Something like a third of students will just never be able to pass Algebra II no matter how hard they work. (Obviously being very lazy can tank your grades, but this is only the problem for a very small number of poor performers.)
It seems like IQ (or SAT/ACT score, which is incredibly strongly correlated to IQ) is determined partially by genetics and partially by non-shared environment (ie, not school, not home life, some kind of totally unknown x-factor, hypothesized to be largely determined prenatally because one thing we
know makes a difference here, even in the First World, is iodine supplementation, which you should really really really do if you are ever pregnant),
and working hard does not help. What this means is that it's very important that our education system -- which is essentially governmental at this point -- doesn't foreclose access to jobs with dignity to those who can't hack it. "If you're not rich you have no excuse" isn't true; first of all because everyone is rich by the standards of the not-too-distant past, but second because obviously many people don't have the skills, knowledge, or intelligence to become rich by our standards. (Including many very educated people, for that matter). This is totally fine because as long as we incentivize people to grow the pie by having a strongly capitalist economic system, everyone will do better in an absolute sense over time.
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