You can add all the weasel words you want, it doesn't make his claim any more accurate. The biggest thing is resources, in some fields the government spends more than anybody else or is the only group researching something so they will have the best people, cryptography or missile defense, and in other places they are completely dwarfed by private industry and have a hard time getting the brightest/most hard working, financial regulators vs banks/hedge funds. There is nothing inherent to the government about this.....if you have spend more than the competition you'll get better people, whether you are the government or Goldman Sachs.

That is why you need to diversify your skill set. Gotta be a sports bettor, prop player, any variant of poker player, blackjack card counter, etc. when the market gets bad.

Can someone make some empirically testable assertions in this thread that are not inherently vague or ambiguous?

The way to ensure that you are "right" in these sorts of debates is to adhere to a bunch of vague and/or unverifiable assumptions or presuppositions. See Popper, Karl. Actual smart people recognize such methodological issues and active strive to not to isolate their ideas from confrontation with reality.

Obviously this is why I attempted to isolate examples from the real world, the Departments of defense and corrections. While this is still fairly a large scope, it reduced the range of my discussion and provides concrete examples so that we can minimize generalizations.

HahaHaha you make up a completely fictitious claim made by Sklansky and accuse me of using weasel words when I point that out. You just cannot make this **** up. Too funny.

I was thinking along the same lines.

I never accused you of using weasel words, Sklansky clearly did in the op. Apparently you can make this **** up.....since you just did.

Spoken like a true social scientist! I wish it could be so simple. The sad reality is that many of the empirical research techniques - especially those that rely on developing quantitative measures of inherently uncountable phenomena (see, e.g., any and all quantitative models of the judiciary) - are so poorly designed that they ultimately obscure (rather than clarify) the debate. And this is to say nothing of the fact that the ostensible disciplining of thought they imply often hides the political nature of the choice of metrics and presentation of evidence. I'd actually rather people just be upfront about their normative commitments, since these will ultimately be revealed through the veneer of objectivity anyway.

I mean, we could operationalize Sklansky's claim as one about the mean IQ of employees in supervisory roles in government bureaus A, B, & C vs. the mean IQ of employees in supervisory roles at companies X, Y, & Z. But - as I argued earlier - why bother? That's engaging a premise that is frankly ridiculous on its face. As though if the result of comparison were that the IQs in the government bureaus were dramatically lower, we would all have to accede that the reason government seems power hungry is that mediocre people have conspired to protect each other through its apparatus?

Spoken like a true intellectual quitter. Someone who instead of accepting the challenge of pushing forward and advancing the pursuit of unknown knowledge, makes excuses why it should not be attempted.

Complex minds are constantly seeking out causal explanations in an attempt at understanding and defining reality with measured causal variables. It is the coordinated work of this scientific community that builds a whole picture of reality and the infinite components that define and determine Who we are and Why events occur.

[QUOTE= As though if the result of comparison were that the IQs in the government bureaus were dramatically lower, we would all have to accede that the reason government seems power hungry is that mediocre people have conspired to protect each other through its apparatus?[/QUOTE]

It doesn't have to be a conscious "conspiracy".

The point is that the conservative argument that we have to encourage ambitious, talented people to become entrepreneurs etc. without interference from government, (for the sake of everybody), is an argument that doesn't sit too well to anybody who isn't in that category, government employee or not. They may reluctantly agree. But they will rarely enthusiastically agree. because to do that tends to detract from their self worth. So the bias that government workers have to inject themselves into other's live will be even stronger from those who don't want to believe that it is important to leave people more competent than them alone.

I agree that astronauts are exceptions.

This is the infantile and narcissistic conservative theory of regulation. Yea those damn mediocre regulators getting in the way of the masters of the universe.

I said it was the conservative argument. I have no opinion as to whether it is correct.

FYP

Well it's not exactly a conservative principle. Everyone wants entrepreneurs to succeed, even those "envious" meddlesome regulators. The issue is one of ideology.

If you take the viewpoint that the point of regulators is just to expand their fiefdoms because of envy you're going to miss why regulation exists in the first place. Because businesses affect people other than themselves, so people have a government to look after their interests. This makes regulation a conversation about interests in a society sometimes competing, sometimes aligning instead of being some shadowy villain there to spoil the entrepreneur's fun.

Of course there can be over regulation, inefficient and/or ineffective regulation, but at heart it's about a responsible, cohesive society of which entrepreneurs or the business class plays a part.

I look at people who are successful in the private sector, particularly entrepreneurs, in the same way I do tournament poker winners. It definitely takes some skill to be successful, but for every Greg Raymer there are plenty of Jerry Yang's and Ari Golds. Right place at the right time may be the most important element.

Determination is most important to success in business, intellectuality is much less important. I have played poker against countless business owners in Miami, and a lot of them had failed repeatedly but kept pushing until they found a niche. Not to mention many of them were much wealthier than me, and I would definitely not consider them the sharpest tools in the shed generally.

Government sector appeals to quitters, people who, unlike the successful business people I previously mentioned, refuse to pick themselves up from failure and keep pursuing their purpose.

In the Government sector there is not nearly the amount of stressful, demanding measures to insure workplace efficiency as you find in the private sector. Measures such as production quotas and the precisely defined expectations as one finds in the private sector. Also in Government their is a much lower rate of firing and a steady rate of promotion almost independent of merit.

Yes, I know. I was using these edgy, uncommon rhetorical devices called "sarcasm," "exaggeration," and "humor."

And my point is still that this is dreadfully bad logic. As has already been explained to you, the very idea that government workers have a "bias... to inject themselves into other's live" [sic] is ridiculous, and the notion that society can be neatly divided into "ambitious, talented people" and lazy schlubs is embarrassingly simple-minded. The basic premises of your argument are nonsensical. Which is why the empirical comparison of IQs or whatever doesn't matter.

There is a category in the middle. I never said otherwise. But if you don't think the top 5 percent or so don't account for 90% of the reason we aren't living in the middle ages, you are naive.

(On the other hand I think those top five percent sometimes get rich way out of proportion to what they "deserve" from the standpoint of their effort sacrifice and risk taking. And to redistribute them is not wrong. It seems that very few agree with both my conflicting sentiments.)

I do not think it is healthy to use such discrete characterizations as 5% top 10% etc. when referring to something as fluidly dynamic as a person's status/ability. People are generally always free to improve themselves and recreate themselves in a more successful version.

The implication from 5% 10% etc. is that there is a fixed number of people who are losers, or perhaps have an innate disposition to mediocrity. This would contradict measurements of social mobility and the dire need for more volatility(social/educational opportunity) when it comes to social mobility.

The fixed rate assertion is refuted greatly by mainstream molecular genetics consensus, which does not set any predisposed limits on human potential (except in cases of disease) and geneticists cannot predict financial success from an allele distribution (knowing a person's genes).

Another important distinction to make is between the contributions of intellectual elites vs. those of wealthy elites. The very top minds have created the most innovation and improvements to humankind(mostly intellectuals and the scientific community as a whole). The wealthiest, on the other hand, continue to extract resources and exert political control at a disproportionate and unjustified level, exponentially growing their wealth reserves. Sometimes these two populations do overlap, but rarely.

Hi Everyone:

Along the same lines as David's original post, but before he wrote his post, I sent a letter to the President and received a response. Here it is reproduced below and all comments are welcome:











Best wishes,
Mason

I agree. The top 5% are to a large degree those who choose to be there. Its not fixed from birth. And the top scientists are a lot more important than the top entrepreneurs.

Thanks for the succinct agreement. You always had an efficient way with words, I own a few books.

+1

This situation represents a paradox though. The populations really need regulation as a means to express and defend their financial interests against corporate indiscretions.

Unfortunately the responsibility of designing laws of regulation, and the mechanisms for enforcing regulations are made up of none other than...government employees. Therefore their employees and the policies and mechanisms of enforcing regulation are not sharpened by competitive market forces and are thus a flawed product.

A lot of the regulation policy is inept and greatly reduces the efficiency of business operations and market forces while at the same time not reflecting the best interests of the people's resources and needs. Thereby impeding businesses and somehow simultaneously not reflecting the interests of the people they are elected to support, a dual feat of failure like only government can achieve.

It is remarkable regulation policy can be this bad. Although some would argue that by nature regulation policies create inefficiency in business and is therefore inherently bad. However, the historic legacy of regulation policy in the early 1900's alone is enough to justify and illustrate their need to contain widespread corruption and abuse.

The confusion is further compounded by the fact that wealthy elitist contribute way more to political campaigns and thus quietly have an undue influence in all things regarding regulation and shape it to their benefit.

Can you give some examples of regulations that you think are particularly bad?

I agree with the need for regulation just not the way it is currently enforced. Obviously some of the recent economic collapse supports the need for much tighter regulatory measures especially in the Banking/Finance Sector.

But read almost any issue of the magazine The Economist and they will quickly and usually accurately point out a policy of regulation that is screwing up how a business has to do their operations in the real world at this very minute. While simultaneously not protecting the resources and interests of the people at large. It amazing the scope of failed policy and its effects and The Economist, while pro business and a bit conservative for my taste overall, illustrates so much of the backwardness in regulatory policy.