Like most of you, I spent a good part of the holiday season thinking about the H-1B Visa Program.
Sorry, I was pulling your leg. I spent a lot of time thinking about the College Football Playoffs which is almost as complicated as the H-1B Visa Program.
The H-1B Visa Program allows US employers to hire foreign works in specialty fields like IT because Americans are fat lazy doofuses. (This is not true. Some of Americans are skinny.)
Who is to blame for Americans being dumb-dumbs while all foreigners are really smart? Well, according to Vivek Ramaswamy (you remember him?) it is all our culture's fault.
In a 12/26/24 post on "X" (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), Ramaswamy said, "The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture."
Our culture "has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer)."
He says, "A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math Olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers."
Okay.
I went to Wheeler High School in the 70s and we celebrated our prom queens because they were easier to look at than the Math Olympiads. We were really shallow people back then.
I'm not so sure our culture "venerates" Cory from "Boy Meets World because I'm not sure which one was Cory. Americans do venerate Urkel because he is the only funny one on "Family Matters." If Americans actually do not venerate Urkel, it is because he spent a good part of his time trying to get smacky face from Laura Winslow instead of trying to become an engineer. Not that I would know that.
Ramaswamy adds, "(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates)."
Here's a "fact". "Multiple sets" of immigrant parents in the 90s could be two, twenty, four hundred, or a million people. I'm unaware of any study that blamed American Youth Dumb-Dumbness on too much "Boy Meets World." I'm not sure that this argument proves proves Hal and Helen's kids were successful STEM graduates because they didn't watch "Family Matters". But then again, I watched a lot of "Gilligan's Island" growing up and I didn't become a wildly successful STEM graduate. In my defense, I can talk for hours about why Mary Ann is way hotter than Ginger.
Ramaswamy goes on to say, "More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.'”
You hear a lot that adults are "stuck" in the decade they came of age in. This is not the 90s. I'm not too sure Ramaswamy has been to the mall lately. You don't see a lot of kids just "hanging out" at the mall.
In fact, you don't see a lot of people in the mall anyway.
On top of that, there aren't Saturday morning cartoons anymore. We have entire channels devoted to cartoons. You would think Vivek would know that.
Ramaswamy is right to the extent that there is a culture problem. We put too much emphasis on sports, particularly "travel" ball, which separates the talented kids from the less talented kids. We place too much emphasis on entertainment as a career when entertainment is just as iffy as sports as a career because, often, it is just a matter of luck rather than talent.
But, as Jack Butler of National Review says, "We won’t solve these problems by disdaining possible sources of virtue, by misapprehending contemporary social realities, and by mechanistically funneling more and more people toward preset pathways of supposed success."
In the television show "Young Sheldon," ten-year-old Sheldon Cooper is placed in the local high school because of his "once in a generation intellect" (his words, not mine.)
His only friend is a South Vietnamese immigrant named Tam. Sheldon and Tam eat lunch in the library because the East Texas high school crowd shuns them.
One time, Tam's mother left a note in Tam's lunch. It said, "Do better".
We need people to push us to do better. And sometimes, we need to tell them to chill.
