Investing in Higher Education Will Not Bring Democratic Equality:
Most public officials are mesmerized by the egalitarian fantasy. They insist that investing more in higher education will even out inequalities by helping those at the bottom get an Associate's Degree to compete with Ivy League graduates. No Virginia, Santa Claus cannot help those baffled by Algebra I to earn millions doing mind-boggling Wall Street swaps and derivatives. And take heed, Occupy Wall Streeters: next year's 1% will be even smarter and richer than today's 1% as the pool of applicants to top colleges expands as a resul tof growing worldwide wealth. In fact, thanks to this relentless upward pressure from an ever larger pool of applicants, today's 1% may eventually be displaced by those with even higher IQ's.
Those who wave the bloody flag of "fairness" in the income distribution are doomed. Exceptional talent, as any sports fan can tell you, does not come cheap. Bill Gates was once asked to identify his greatest competitor. He said Goldman Sachs. A puzzled interviewer asked why, and Gates responded that both Goldman and Microsoft competed for the same prime intellectual talent at the very edge of the bell curve's right side. Finding and rewarding top intellectual ability in today's global economy is incompatible with economic leveling though, ironically, this "unfair" meritocracy that looks nothing like those below will bring greater prosperity to everyone.
