How money makes you smarter.

PART 1 - Elite Performance.

Hello everyone,

I had a great time with this one. It’s a fair bit longer than Monday’s, so I’ve split it into two parts. This is Part 1, and I’ll release Part 2 tomorrow.

I’ll still publish the next piece on Friday. Joined Up Thinking three days in a row. Lucky youse!

As always, I hope you enjoy reading these as much as I enjoy writing them. If you do, and can think of a friend who might like them, there’s a button right here that will make two people’s days better!

In thanks and gratitude,
Yianni

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HOW MONEY MAKES YOU SMARTER…

PART 1: Elite Performance

In 1995, the year that I matriculated, something like 35% of the students in my year at Scotch College (WARNING: Website costs 25c per visit) finished in the Top 10% of the state.

I was one of them.

Obviously, this is because the 1995 Scotch College crop was packed with singularly brilliant students, such as myself. Our marks alone suggest that each of us were on average three-and-a-half times as intelligent and capable as the rest of the state. Right?

It’s actually because when you’re a school who gets $20,000+ a student: your cricket teams play on turf, you get your choice of teachers, and when one of your Bunsen burners breaks, you just buy another Bunsen burner.

It’s not the students. It’s the well resourced environment around them. It’s the self-belief that comes from knowing that you’re being given the best opportunities.

I’d almost say that, given you find the same results year after year, with student crop after student crop, in private school after private school, that it’s not actually the students getting those marks.

It’s more accurate to say that it’s the environment that’s acing exams, winning Premier’s Awards and getting into law and medicine. I mean the kids change every year. They’re just the vector.

The environment is actually what you’re paying for. For twenty large a year, private schools can shunt young Master Average (perhaps a solid sixty-five out there) way up into the nineties range. That’s enough juice to guide your mediocre kid somewhere good.

Into the slipstream of the upper-middle classes. Into the world’s oldest professions. If you went to my school, you could even become the sitting Liberal MP for Kew.

Environment vs Willpower.

Why is that girl over there in the throes of a lifelong drug addiction whilst your daughter has a job and a family and manages to hold it together very well?

Maybe she’s not trying hard enough. Maybe she’s selfish. Maybe she’s a fundamentally flawed person?

Or maybe it’s because her father was a violent alcoholic, or a teacher sexually abused her. Maybe her mother undermined her and competed with her for affection because she herself was trapped in a loveless marriage.

It could be any of those, or some as yet unsung tune you’re not aware of from the countless list of sad songs in life’s shitty hymnal.

She knows the truth. She’s sung the song. But she doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s why she takes the drugs: to forget, ignore it and numb herself. She needs to talk about it, sure. But that’s a different issue.

Now it’s possible that having lived the exact same life, your daughter might still come out making better decisions than this lost cause.

But then again, maybe not. Perhaps it’s about the environment?

Research consistently shows that our environments shape our behaviours, opportunities and outcomes far more than almost any other factor, including genetics and ability.

Hell, in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond suggests that the orientation (vertical or horizontal) of each continent might well explain the speed, success or otherwise of the people on them in moving from hunter-gatherer to agricultural villages and societies, answering the question “Why did European countries colonise Africa and not the other way around” with the stunning answer, “geography”. Talk about joined up thinking!

Each person is born with differing aptitudes and strengths. But when one group exceeds another by 35%, year after year, student after student, are there any such thing as smart and average students?

Or just nurtured and less nurtured ones?

DEPRIVILEGE - Half privilege, half deprivation.

Money can’t solve everything however.

Economically disadvantaged children can be rich in everything but money. Whereas rich kids spoon fed every social advantage can do so absent intimacy, care and love.

So? It’s just that well-adjusted poor people grow up into ‘That nice manager you have at your work’. Whereas the wealthy but love-poor time and time again grow into high functioning, high status sociopaths and influencers.

This is a sub-optimal outcome to say the least, and we’re breeding them like prize pigs the more we tolerate a world in which money can substitute for things like compassion, kindness and giving a fuck about anything or anyone beyond yourself.

Now why am I talking about this?

Mo’ money, less problems.

I recently saw a suggestion that perhaps many of the problems we face in the world could be solved by recruiting billionaires to contribute. I presume this is because they’re better or more capable people, a fact reflected by their wealth.

Allow me to posit a different theory. Hear me out.

The minute Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain invented the transistor in 1947, it immediately became true that about fifty years later (once the technology matured and we transitioned our entire lives onto whatever platforms it led towards), that some people were going to get filthy rich.¹

In our reality it was Zuck, Bezos, Gates, etc. But if it wasn’t them, it would have been some other nerds who got lucky. Like the Altavista guy or something.

I think it’s incorrect to say these people made those billions. I think the environment earned that money. The billionaires are just the vector.

And please please please don’t make the mistake of looking up to lucky nerds. I was a stand-up for twenty years. I know hundreds of them. I wouldn’t trust them to make consequential decisions for anything over five people let alone five billion.

And even then…

Five. Million. Years.

Jeff Bezos is worth $177 billion.

$177,000,000,000.

For my local readers, that’s in US dollars. In Aussie dollars he’s worth about 42% more, about $250 billion.

Now you and I don’t really have a frame of reference for $250 BILLION dollars. So let’s break it down.

The average wage in Australia is $90,000 (US$63,900)

Don’t worry if it seems high. It’s being pulled up by people like Bezos.

So rather than that, let’s look at the median income (line everyone in the country up from poorest to richest. How much does the middle person earn?)

It’s $51,000 (US$35,500) Let’s call it $50k to keep the maths neat.

To earn what Jeff Bezos is worth right now the average Australian worker would have to work for FIVE MILLION YEARS. Seven million working in an Amazon Fulfilment Centre.

Five. Million. Years.

Remember when humans split off the genome from gorillas and chimpanzees?

No? Me neither. Probably because it was FIVE MILLION YEARS AGO.

I put this to J-Baze and he pointed out that it’s a slightly unfair comparison. He hasn’t earned that money in one year and we’re comparing it to an annual salary.

This is very true, and is that kind of attention to detail that merits you earning five million years worth of salary, so let’s be fair to Jeff and compare apples and apples.

Bezos is 58 years old. Let’s say he started work at 18, so he’s been working for 40 years.

Now let’s divide the clearly inflammatory FIVE MILLION years statistic by 40. Now it’s only 125,000 years that an average Australian would have to work to match Jeff.

That’s still a horrendous indictment on humanity. But it’s not five million, and that’s something.

So let’s be clear. It would take the average worker five million years to earn what Jeff Bezos has earned. But only one hundred and twenty five thousand working lifetimes.

Better.

Value vs Worth.

This isn’t intrinsically a problem. The problem comes because society conflates monetary value and worth.

When someone asks “What’s Zuckerberg worth?”, people don’t say

“Worth?

Well let’s see. He’s a captain all at sea helming his magic, money shitting put-put boat.

He’s undermined every form of advertising media, fuelled or at the very least enabled political polarisation.

Our economic system has unhelpfully aligned those insidious outcomes with the profitability of his company whilst mandating he maximise shareholder value, legally compelling him to be antagonistic to any social damage he causes.

All of this is happening whilst Facebook is domiciled paying 0% tax in Ireland, which gutted its tax regime post GEC as it took regulatory gold in the race to the bottom.

So, barring his fundamental value and dignity as a human being, right now he’s probably acting as a $10,000 drag on every individual on Earth.”

People do not say that.

They say “Zuck’s worth $60 billion. Maybe he can help.”

Systemic problems.

He’s not the solution. He’s the problem. But he’s not. If it wasn’t Zuck it’d be some other nerdbro.

Like my high achieving private school brethren, he and his shape-shifting company are a product of their environment: the economic system, technological development, the regulatory and legal environment.

His product caught fire and now he doesn’t play by the same economic rules as everyone else. There’s privilege, there’s Scotch College, and then there’s Facebook; who can make injurious decisions, still make a killing and outsource the fallout to everyone on Earth.

Here’s a hypothetical. If every time I shot up heroin, the next morning $2,000 appeared in my wallet whilst any negative physical and mental effects were delegated to you or some other poor sap, why would I change my behaviour?

WHAT can we do about it?
WHO can help?
and WHY would we want to?

All will be revealed tomorrow in PART 2, entitled ‘Capitalism? Clocked it mate.’

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Hello again,

I hope you liked today’s piece.

Just to let everyone know, that there is a comment section on the Substack website and in the app.

Over the long term, I’d really love this page to become a place where as a community we can have intelligent discussions about the things I write about.

I know a lot of you are probably reading this in your email app, possibly on your phone.

I’m quite new to the platform too. So just a reminder that there is a comments section, and a button to take you there at the bottom of this post.

If you have something to share: an experience, a thought that reading this brought up, anything, I’d love to hear from you.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER.

• How has your environment influenced your life?

• Have you ever consciously changed your environment? What effect did it have?

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Either share this post.

Or the Joined Up Thinking page.

See you all again tomorrow.
Yianni Agisilaou
22nd June, 2022.

1. Subject to the outcome of the Cold War.