Because if that anecdote is true, Morgenbesser is clearly insane. Drill down on your intuition about why he's insane and you arrive at "he's violating IIA".
> You only take a job in business operations if you aren’t smart enough to be an engineer (or designer, or product manager, or…)
The article claims that this is false. But in fact, it's pretty obvious that the average non-engineer is less intelligent than the average engineer. See for instance this table of IQ by college major: http://www.statisticbrain.com/iq-estimates-by-intended-colle...
(And, yes, IQ tests do quite accurately capture what is meant by "intelligence".)
1. No, IQ tests capture what a certain type of people mean by intelligence. This is especially true, given that I can consistently perform less well on, for example, the spatial portion of an IQ test than the logical portion. Unless you're willing to say that there is not any other important component (such as say, oratory intelligence) to someone's ability to perform, or be intelligent. My skepticism says it's likely that, in fact, there is a positive correlation between how good you are at manipulating objects and math and your IQ score, whereas there's little to no correlation between emotional acuity and IQ. But if, due to your social skills and emotional abilities, you're not able to cut it in the arts or humanities, you're more likely to become an engineer. Which tells you nothing of what types of majors "roundly" intelligent people (i.e. those with relatively equal IQ and non-IQ intelligence) choose.
2. Your source doesn't even support your assertion, at least if you're claiming non-engineers, in the same companies as engineers, are on average less intelligent. Mathematicians, Philosophers and Economists are overwhelmingly non-engineers. CIS gets the same IQ as "Other Humanities and Art".
You seem to be implying that we should focus on reducing demand. That could be true, but "X implies Y" does not necessarily imply that the best way of eliminating Y is to eliminate X. For instance, "We don't have a murder problem, we have a "people exist" problem."
So politicians are in a conspiracy to not stop problems? Sounds unlikely to me, I think it's more like:
* Many politicians, like most people, are idiots. Partly because many voters are also idiots.
* Politicians don't have strong incentives to stop problems. (But they don't have strong incentives to preserve problems, either. They're only incentivized to be popular.)
* Principal-agent problems. Even if a politician comes up with a brilliant solution, the people lower in the chain won't execute it well, because they often don't have strong incentives to.
Anyway, there was a conspiracy to preserve problems, any particular politician could start solving problems. This would likely place him above his peers. Then his peers might backstab him, but they also might join him, since he'll have increased popularity. Essentially, we have a sort of iterated n-player prisoner's dilemma; or rather, at each step we choose m people (non-randomly) to together participate in an m-player prisoner's dilemma. It might be interesting to try to model this mathematically.
Inertia. It seems fairly established that privatized prisons pour lobbying money into political pockets to push for arbitrarily harsher sentencing. You can't just reverse this or you are painted as "soft on crime". Even when the actual social impact of these policies are tremendously negative and only benefit a small number of private investors.
I thought The Wire's "Hamsterdam" episode was a great parable on what would happen in America if an influential politician fought inertia and tried to implement socially responsible drug policies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsterdam
I think the influence of the private prison operator while real is overstated. It makes a good story but they have less that 4% of US prisoners.
Much more influential are the prison guard and police unions and organizations. In California alone they oversee more prisoners than all the private prison operators combined and they are very active in strengthening sentencing[1].
But as stated by others the main problem is the politics. There are real problems and politicians can score points with naive voters by "doing something". On the other hand reducing sentences is a very risk position for politician to take.
Blame the politicians and voters as it is their responsibility to set the rules of the game. All the other parties are simply acting in their self-interest.
This report argues that private prisoner percentages are much higher if you include all forms of state detention[1], eg "more than half of Louisiana’s 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies as part of a broader financial incentive scheme."
I don't think it's as easy as blaming the voters. The political system seems caught in a negative feedback loop, greased by lobbyist money and with no clear offramp.
The article uses misleading numbers. Sure, that 2% bonus is worth $60k if you compound it over 40 years. But that number is almost irrelevant. What's relevant is the opportunity cost. If you spent that time (likely hundred or thousands of hours) working on more valuable skills, you'd likely get much more than 2%. Put another way, the value of that time, when compounded over 20 years, is enormous, probably more enormous than $60k. To compound the value gained from language but not compound the value of the time is extremely misleading - either use present values for both, or use comparable future values for both.
