Survival was a consuming obsession when humankind was nascent and scant. Some folks endured paradise - Pacific islands, south coastal British Columbia, Africa - dispelling ennui by killing their neighbors and gorging their priests. Absent written language their Official histories are games of Telephone. People indulging in surpluses but hounded by climatic vagaries killed their neighbors, gorged their priests, and thought. Euclid pinned god onto a slate (pi was sloppy until Viete's triumphal nine decimal places, 1589). Aristotle formulated rigorous self-consistent thought, then invented Garbage In Garbage Out (enthusiastically adopted crack child of the One True Church).
Prior to President Johnson's Great Society a person loathe to exert personal effort towards food and shelter was written out of the social script. Education was brutish and crude, successfully processing millions of European immigrant scum into Americans speaking English in New York City alone. Floods of college-bound morons rich with tuition and fees though incapable of passing freshman calculus triggered an implosion of Liberal Arts' random caterwauling plus scientific jargon to evolve the soft sciences of psychology, sociology, political economics, political science, counseling, and social activism. Social engineering was born - jackbooted State compassion.
Dissertation Abstracts cites Masters and Doctors degrees planetwide. DA/Physical Sciences occupies a couple of library shelves and contains the birth squeals of all technological civilization. DA/Social Sciences is paper stacked twelve feet wide and seven feet high, a wall of scholarly vacuum. Within it resides nothing.
How can peer-reviewed academic social engineering sum to intense negative values like "Whip Inflation Now," stagflation, Project Head Start, $18 trillion disappeared into Welfare with no abatement whatsoever, Officially compensatory reverse discrimination, and high school graduates who cannot read their diplomas? Corruption and political patronage aside, consider PSmith9626's dollop of n-dimensional geometry:
"As n goes up the volume of an n-sphere lies mostly close to the surface. At 10 dimensions 99% of the volume lies within 1/10 radius of the boundary, a very thin skin. When you have lots of parameters most solutions perch on the edge. In complex multi-variable social problems near-boundary points are overwhelmingly important, yet social theorists champion average or median values of every parameter." They create and hoard rarefied crap.
The top 2% really is the top 2% and the dregs really are the dregs. No discrimination, racism, or Ritalin is required. A 30% high school dropout rate remains unchanged over 40 years because it reflects the true nature of physical reality. A third of humanity is better off instructed in manual arts and apprenticed skills than intensively drilled in ontological recapitulation of hermaneutic social themes threading Gilligan's Island. Freed resources are best invested in the Severely Gifted, midwives to a future nobody loaths.
Social philosophers, social engineers, social theorists... don't want solutions, they want rationalizations for more Liberally funded arguments. The harder you look the more variables you find. A pleasant and effective zero-goal diversion from being held accountable for getting the original job done appears. Cf: American zero-goal education replete with teachers' aids, school psychologists, special education instructors, Federal compliance administrators, remedial instruction consultants, health monitors, arts and crafts staff, physically challenged children's attendants, racial equity regulators, pregnancy ombudsmen, dyslexia therapists, diversity intercessors, sexual tolerance advocates, cultural maintenance engineers, human factors evaluators, drug abuse programs, students and the teacher. More studies are needed. More variables are needed to embrace the mean.
The four story $200 million Belmont Learning Center is a Los Angeles high school pegged at $50 million more estimated than Chicago's Sears Tower cost to build for real. That it is perched upon a toxic waste dump rich with methane (explosive) and hydrogen sulfide (smell of rotten eggs) has not deterred its compassionate completion for Black and Brown communities. The Army Corps of Engineers is now in on it, cost to completion revised upward to a cool $1 billion. (You got it, fella - "billion" with a "b" - 100% minority contractors.) Bill Gate's multi-story pleasure dome home on exclusive lakeside turf cost $30 million to build including subterranean bowling alley, trampoline room, and parking structure.
Political economics imposes more severe sequelae than Night Basketball and Al Gore's ruptured Achilles tendon. Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman and his Boys from Chicago social engineered America into President Jimmy "Nukular Engineer" Carter's economic toilet. Friedman's subsequent Chilean economic miracle in kind rendered patron Augusto Pinochet an international fugitive finally imprisoned in Spain and pursued by folks still sensationally pissed off 25 years later. Economists call this "heteroskedasticity," stuff that escapes reams of fudge factors aimed toward the mean.
As 2004 closed, 360 million Hindu gods plus a garbage truck overflowing with Allah each and all sent a Richter 9 temblor and tsunami douche into the Indian ocean. Some 250,000 little Brown victims were killed and 5-10 million survivors avidly lined up to be "threatened." The UN estimated a few donated $billion over a few years should restore all the slums and cesspools. Would anybody be surprised if $10 billion disappeared without a burp? $50 billion?
Why send anything at all? Let the Reverend Malthus look up from Hell, giggling, and deliver a "gotcha" from well beyond the grave. If a million dead accumulated (c'mon cholera and dysentery!) they would all be replaced within a couple of years by busy Brown poxy loins. Then, the VICTIMS would go back to killing each other.
Haiti in 2010 enjoy its greatest prosperity in a decade after a Richter 8 temblor smacked Port au Prince into the 21st century with over a $billion in donate aid. 30,000 Native Americans in South Dakota lost power, water, and food distribution when their 75% unemployment rate was mightily snowed upon in February. The Bureau of Indian Affairs scheduled lunch with FEMA for late March.
How many social engineers, counselors, and rights activists are busy fixing America and submitting expense chits as you read this? Homeland Severity, War on Drugs, War on Poverty, BATF, Title I, Title IX, hate language, Welfare, night baskeball, equity, diversity, "every child left behind..."