calc bc is not really 'math', that starts at basic intro to proofs course like uni-level discrete math or real analysis. obviously 'verbal elite' is no less inherently socially legitimate than 'illiterate mounted warrior elite' once was but if we're talking about top-tier intelligence (ability to genuinely comprehend and have insight into complex systems, not just facilely string together just-so stories), a guy who can barely crack calc bc is not even in the top 10k in the pac nw, sorry
id also note we’re really one or two generations past the high water mark of the ‘verbal’ elite, e.g. every new billionaire is a guy who was good at math, the garden path to ascending to upper-middle class status runs through STEM and you personally are just coasting off the accumulated wealth of the previous generation
Yeah I think a lot of why I had thought of myself as STEM-leaning in the first place was I was just good at doing calculations in my head and when I saw that’s where math was going in college it just didn’t interest me like history. Honestly if I even had to go back in that direction I’d go with a more immediately applicable field of engineering.
As for the rest\u2014 well, it’s clearly about your broader issues and I’m just being used as a peg to hang it on, but I’ll say this: in the 1980s there were\ufffc exactly that kind of path-to-UMC careers in the telecom, medical, and chemical industries of southern New Jersey.
But New Jersey had relatively high state taxes to support, honestly, a lot of the wreckage of midcentury coastal industrial urbanism \u2013 Camden, Philly’s Newark, was especially heinous \u2013 and I realize now that a lot of the adults I encountered at say, the country club in those years were in the process \u2013 extending the utilities, polishing the schools, laying out subdivisions, preventing a Mount Laurel-equivalent inclusive zoning precedent, creating a unified calendar of local enrichment activities for kids, using weird carve-outs in state law (“resort town” designation) to push our town as the cultural hub \u2013 of luring them and using them as raw material with which to build a new world in their names.
And these guys weren’t mathematically illiterate \u2013 summer work in a law firm you come to realize that development financing structures are often very logically and mathematically (and legally!) complex \u2013 but what they were doing, upstream of all those grad-schooled workers, was basically reading trends, applying judgment to them as related to facts on the ground, and doing the verbal/relational work of convincing each other to act \u2013 like I said, clan of lawyers, the ability to construct a chain of reasoning to lead people to any given conclusion is not something to be underestimated \u2013 and that’s the sense of the world I first internalized
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