Nick writes: “But education, to a very large degree and in the very long run, pays for itself in economic benefits to the educated, themselves, and to the communities where they live; medicine, by and large, does not.”
Holding a license or being in a labor union or cartel also can carry economic benefits. Because education is mostly pursued for that reason (and out of fear), and because natural variation in IQ is wider than what education can influence, and because intelligence is not the same as the opportunity to get an education, it leads to the situation where the more-intelligent-but-uneducated may be ruled by the less-intelligent-but-educated. Among all the kinds of injustices in the world, and all the kinds of abuses of power, this is not a huge one, but universities certainly do have a motive to make education appear to be as valuable as possible. One way to do that is to make sure its absence is perceived as dangerous and that access to it is scarce and expensive. It seems to me medicine (defined broadly) will be lot more valuable in the not so distant future: Suppose the genetic determinants of short-term memory or spatial reasoning or emotional intelligence could be engineered into a child? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/those-superhumans-of-the-future-stephen-hawking-feared-look-around/2018/10/19/e7bcafc6-d3bd-11e8-b2d2-f397227b43f0_story.html Marcus
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