Remedy for Remedies
I’ve never studied this intensely, ever. Not in grammar school, not in high school, definitely not in college, or law school. The Bar is really starting to Hurt; my brain is pudding at the end of the day. But I have allowed myself some minor indulgences, and a major indulgence this week. The minor: canneles de bordeaux as my study snack. The major: I took last night off to see the Magnetic Fields. An intimate, acoustic, witty, ukelele-infused, mournful, self-indulgent, romantic (in the 19th century sense), snarky, bantering, anecdote-chocked, all-together awesome show. They have been my soundtrack to Bar studying.
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On a different note, Phil Greenspun passed along some interesting information from the Bell Curve about the IQ level of the American gene pool. The book argues that our gene pool is literally becoming less intelligent each year because of how fertility is skewed towards people who have lower IQs. For instance, the higher-IQ women put off kids for a career, and have one, or if they are lucky two, compared with someone who gets married at 18, and proceeds to pop up four or five youngins’. He remarks that this isn’t a bad thing, because it would be incredibly difficult for the US to absorb a signicantly larger, well-educated workforce because they would push up prices for everyone else. Could one imagine Manhattan real estate prices, if there were 2 or 3 times as many young professionals as there are now?
billy breakfast
July 22, 2004 @ 2:07 pm
this actually isn’t a profound idea; you should check out jared diamond’s ‘guns, germs, and steel’. in the same vein, he believes that aborginal australians may have the highest average iq at this point in time.
david bang
July 22, 2004 @ 5:28 pm
I read the post, and I think he makes a great point about a great deal of things.
One disagreement I have is in the area of “our place” in the US of 2050. When the trend is one that is moving towards less children, like he mentioned, what we need to worry about is not not having a job, but having to keep working and not being able to retire due to a lack of qualified personnel to fill the gap. Hmm… Then again, I guess he covered himself well with the argument of outsourcing. Damn Asians!!! Hehe, just kidding.
david bang
July 22, 2004 @ 5:33 pm
Since someone brought up Diamond. His book was interesting and very informative. It was fascinating to read how the small things, ie small imperceptible mutations in wheat, can have such a profound impact in a matter of a few thousand years on the world population, distribution of people, power structure, etc.
echan
July 24, 2004 @ 12:40 pm
About the lack of manpower, the US doesn’t even need to turn to outsourcing. We’ve usually been able to attract the best and the brightest from abroad using sheer economic incentives (ie foreign nursing brain drain b/c of our demand for nurses). This dampers my enthusiasm for the Americans are becoming less intelligent argument. If we attract immigrants who are relatively the smartest and least risk adverse members of their countries, shouldn’t our IQ level remain stable?
billy breakfast
July 24, 2004 @ 4:19 pm
Good point. I think the influx of the best and brightest of the foreigners more than offsets Diamond’s argument of a decreased average IQ for industrialized nations because the effect of which Diamond speaks takes many generations and hundreds of years to even become measurable; the influx of foreign brainpower is immediate. God Bless America and all that shit.
ToastyKen
July 25, 2004 @ 4:50 am
If it makes you feel any better, I just rewatched Catch Me If You Can, and in the extras, the real Frank says that he really did study two weeks for the Louisiana bar and passed.
…
No wait, that doesn’t make you feel better at all, does it? 🙂
😛
Sorry for being an ass. 🙂