Anecdata, but in my honors / AP courses in High School, I was one of two students, our of ~30, whose parents did not have a college degree. Like 20 of the student's parents worked at the local Lockheed Martin. I don't think this was entirely genetics, as much as culture, since I knew plenty of people in my life who were quite smart but lacked academic discipline.

Exactly. The US tech hubs draw heavily from the subset of very talented Americans who aren't seeing the typical dumbed-down part of the education system, and from immigrants, who are over-represented. If anything, they're constantly complaining that they can't find enough talent domestically -- which, yes, is partly "we don't want to pay them enough", but when you consider the costs to sponsor an immigrant, can't entirely be about that.

>From my personal experience, people who are successful usually come from highly educated and/or wealthy families .. [from overseas]. FTFY

As someone acquainted with the insides of AI labs, and who has worked with NIWs in the past, I can tell you the extent to which our advances are dependent on migrant brainpower long ago crossed the "we're able to deny it" threshold.

Most people think of skilled immigration as H1Bs. It's not. H1B is to NIW as TF/PyTorch monkey is to real AI expert. They're just not, at all, the same thing.

I think you mean it was the Soviet Union. Either you scored excellently and were sent to university or at least into engineering, to end up well-paid and comfortable in military research or you scored less than and worked on the fields ... Or were sent into war as cannon fodder.

Or to put it more generally: motivation.

Yes, and one can add political power, which also brings with it industrial/manufacturing power.

There’s certainly cultural reasons. If investors could make a buck off Pierre Zuckerbeurg, they certainly would.

It's plausibly the other way around. Have the best educational system in the world and you can't get anywhere when your economic system is based on politburos and cronyism.

Also notice that the educational system getting dumbed down operates on a generational timescale. If you screw it up for the 10 year olds, it'll still be decades before they're the ones in charge.

your first point is (very) historically inaccurate, on the contrary the Soviet Union heavily funded science and research, which led them to a whole bunch of scientific breakthroughs

> The people driving science forward in the West are educated some other way than strictly according to a "Common Core"

And they always have been, in addition to just being more intelligent, curious, and motivated than average.

> ability to fund science

More like "commercialize" rather then fund.

Technological innovation on both sides of the iron curtain happened due to public investment. If you doubt the US role in this, I'll remind that silicon valley and many of its key accomplishments are outgrowths of military spending.

No government spending, no nice things.

Almost none. I went to engineering school at a major state college in the US, and it was nice to find even an immigrant who had been mostly raised here in the same program.

American elites abandoned Americans after the Soviet Union fell. Only useful as a servant class. They also encouraged parents to abandon their children. Immigrant parents come here and work like mules, spoil and dominate their children, and would never imagine that kicking them to the wolves was a virtue. In the US (and in the West in general), we teach working people to have contempt for their own offspring; it's counter-evolutionary. Meanwhile Western elites spare nothing for their dimwitted failchildren.

The default I expect from any intellectual or technical achievement is a truly challenging last name.

> the truth is America has given up on "shifting the distribution" to the right.

The truth is that most voters don't care about education. People who run for school boards don't do so with policy recommendations backed by research. They do so solely on backgrounds as mediators between teachers, parents, and administrators. Yes, people skills are needed for the job, but people skills are needed for any job. Making people happy is not the same as getting things done, and you need someone who can do both in any job you are hiring for.

> Its impossible to do so at the lower end, without massive redistribution.

Korea and China have shown that it is possible with the political will. Jaime Escalante has shown that even instilling only student will is sufficient.

I think the "growth mindset" is the core problem. In the end it rewards highly motivated idiots, who get praised in spite of failing, while the genius who solves the problem in 10s gets dismissed as "smart, but lazy".