It's not the Great Gatsby Curve. It's Insanity aka Great Whacky Curve: Divergent Thinking Defficiency

In the age of artificial intelligence we are surrounded by The Great Gatsby Curve. Rachel Kushner's piece on the New York Times titled I Kept Failing to Learn French. This Is What Finally Worked  attributes the Great Gatsby Curve of polyglots to luck. Not hard work. As in 'the harder I work, the luckier I get'. “Every true polyglot I’ve known either had foreign languages at home or went to fancy schools or otherwise had access to learn them from a young age, they weren’t morally superior, just luckier," she writes.

Speaker after speaker at the Democratic National Conventions blamed the Great Gatsby Curve on racism, as exemplified by the Washington Post's reporting: "With six words, Michelle Obama rewires America’s conversation on race. Most of us, Michelle Obama said, “will never benefit from the affirmative action of generational wealth.”


Earlier this week, Kayla Zhu reported on the Global Gatsby Curve in a piece titled Ranked: The Countries With the Highest Wealth Inequality  and Justin Weinberg's, reviewed  a new study by Ye Sun, Fabio Caccioli, Xiancheng Li, and Giacomo Livan published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, on the existence and extent of an Academic Great Gatsby Curve.

Pew Research blames the Great Gatsby Curve on a number of factors, including  "technological change, globalization, the decline of unions and the eroding value of the minimum wage."

But the root cause of the Great Gatsby Curve or The “Academic Great Gatsby Curve” in Philosophy is Insanity, not racism, technological change or minimum wage. We call this Insanity: The Great Whacky Curve, Divergent Thinking Defficiency.

In 2023, the top 10% of the world owned nearly three-quarters of the world’s wealth, according to the World Inequality Database

Weinberg is a philosophy professor at the University of South Carolina who teaches and writes about a range of topics in philosophy, including questions about the good life, disagreement & controversy, technology, offense, social policy, love, regret, idealism, the future, the nature and value of philosophy, and more. He writes that The Great Gatsby Curve describes the positive correlation between “income inequality” and “intergenerational income persistence” (lack of income mobility). An academic Great Gatsby curve refers to a positive correlation between academic inequality and intergenerational persistence

Weinberg goes on: "The authors take “academic inequality” to refer to “the uneven distribution of opportunity and academic impact”, operationalized in terms of volume of citations, and “intergenerational persistence” as “the influence that a mentor’s status may have on their protégés’ academic success.” That latter quality is determined by measuring “the similarity between the positions of mentors and their mentees in the impact rankings of their discipline: the higher the rank–rank correlation, the more a mentee’s scientific impact is correlated to that of their mentor, the higher the intergenerational persistence.”

Meanwhile, in a speech in 2011, economist Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors introduced The Great Gatsby Curve. It illustrates the connection between concentration of wealth in one generation and the ability of those in the next generation to move up the economic ladder compared to their parents. The curve shows that children from poor families are less likely to improve their economic status as adults in countries where income inequality was higher – meaning wealth was concentrated in fewer hands – around the time those children were growing up.

Can you spot the difference in the description? It's The Great Whacky Curve

Effect.  For example, ask a human resources professional to solve a problem and the answer will generally involve hiring more people. Ask an engineer to solve the same problem and in general, it will involve getting a new gadget.  Ask an accountant to solve the problem, and in general, it will involve money.  Ask a DEI professionals and it will likely involve a DEI hire or new DEI policy. Where a DEI hire is a term that refers to quotas or targets for hiring racial and ethnic minorities, women, and/or people with disabilities for positions of authority and/or power over job competency.

Abraham Maslow's ‘law of instrument’ or Maslow’s Hammer precedes The Great Gatsby Curve and illustrates The Great Whacky Curve - "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”- refers to an over-reliance on a familiar or favorite tool. While such tools can be very useful at times, over-reliance can result in approaching problems in ways that are not always helpful or even destructive. Such as the current education system in the United States.


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Whether it is The Great Gatsby Curve, or The Great Whacky Curve, the US Education System has exacerbated the problem. Sir Ken Robinson, argues that our current educational systems are doing what they were supposed to - appropriate for the industrial age, still based on a industrial paradigm of education where education is standardized, is about conformity, and kids, who are living in the most stimulating age in history, fail to see the point of going to school, which is about ‘finding the right answers to pass the tests’ rather than about stimulating divergent thinking. Quite the opposite.

The current crop of philosophers is a stark indicator of the failure to promote divergent thinking: Saint Thomas Aquinas was primarily inspired of course by the Bible and the great Christian theological tradition. But he also read and cited with enthusiasm the pagan philosophers Plato. Aristotle and Cicero; The Jewish Rabbi Moses Meimonides, the Muslim scholars Averroes and Avicenna. Even when he disagreed with a thinker, as he did with Origen and Siger of Brabant, he always did so with respect and without polemics. In this, he's a wonderful model for our time, when over 75% of philosophers identify as Atheists and the religious conversation is so sadly marked by rancor and vitiperation.

The Great Whacky Curve Effect

When asked, 'What has the Department of Education accomplished? It's Fact Sheet dated Jan 20, 2022 reads as follows."The Department also canceled $15 billion in loan debt for hundreds of thousands of students and borrowers, took action to advance equity in education, and made critical progress in creating educational environments free from discrimination or harm. It does not mention that the education system has accumulated a $1.8 trillion in student loan debt and trillions more in useless degrees. Thus the Inequity of the Pursuit of Equity Over Public Health.

When a Degree Meant Something

In the past. a degree meant something: the degree holder was responsible, hard-worker, independent and most of all, was well versed in their field of study.. If that person left and went to another state, that would be a brain drain. It is no longre brain drain but more like dead weight augmentation for the receiving state.

The cost of manufacturing useless college degrees increasing exponentially 

The 2020 Pew Research Report states that Economic inequality, whether measured through the gaps in income or wealth between richer and poorer households, continues to widen.

Then Pew, in a gross misapplication of the Theory of Allocation fails to recognize the Great Whacky Curve Effect.  There's a positive correlation between a carpenter's work  and the use of a hammer, for example: Pew Research  figures that "the rise in economic inequality in the U.S. is tied to several factors. These include, in no particular order, technological change, globalization, the decline of unions and the eroding value of the minimum wage. Whatever the causes, the uninterrupted increase in inequality since 1980 has caused concern among members of the public, researchers, policymakers and politicians. One reason for the concern is that people in the lower rungs of the economic ladder may experience diminished economic opportunity and mobility in the face of rising inequality, a phenomenon referred to as The Great Gatsby Curve.

FBI Director Christipher Wray said that civics education is a national security imperative. Yet civics education was replaced with ethnic studies with dire consequences.  The FBI has determined that patriotic and Catholic symbology may indicate domestic terrorism.

There is also a strong correlation between the new crop of philosophers and AntiChristianism:

There is a strong positive correlation between the replacement of civics studies with Ethnic studies and antipatriotism.

The Great Whacky Curve and Maslow’s Hammer was hinted at 2000 years ago by Saint Matthew: "For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. And throw this useless servant into the darkness outside, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth. Matt 25

It's not rocket science.  Show me your priorities and I will show you what you need to work on.  Keep pumping money into the education  industrial complex and you can be sure The Great Gatsby Curve The “Academic Great Gatsby Curve” in Philosophy and The Great Whacky Curve will continue to curve.

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"The analysis from WordFinderX took a deep dive into the languages of the United States—and revealed some fascinating trends along the way" - Mental Floss

Around two billion people worldwide speak English, and the share is considerably higher among the educated.

 Global leaders should master more than one language- most don't:  Joe Biden, is monolingual, as is the President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, China’s Xi Jinping, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

Today, some of the most well-known leaders of English-speaking countries – the United States, Australia, and New Zealand – are monolingual.

Given the facts, why is it government bureaucracies in the United States require printed material in a dozen languages? 

Answer: it's the Great Whacky Curve Effect aka Divergent Thinking Defficiency