Yesterday I was hanging out with some new friends and we briefly slipped into the sub-topic of how insane the 07-10 period was. There's a demographic band of people who had to search for employment during that period who have a bone-deep sense of how bad things can really get. I just cannot stress this enough. For years, everything I applied for had 300-to-1 odds. I am very happy that kids these days have no idea, but they very profoundly have no idea.
I remember seeing Interstellar in theaters. There's a line in there where X says, "there's only a 50% chance this will work," and Y says, "those are the best odds I've had in years."
Reader, I teared up in the cinema because those lines resonated with my experience. Again, I cannot relate to people who do not have firsthand experience of how desperate things were for so many for so long.
Here's a strange thing: most of the elites in the developed world have no liminal experiences with gatekeepers or gatekeeping institutions. They think in terms of binary sorting, sheep and goats. So they look at the most stable indicators rather than the most disruptive ones. It is actually an anti-progressive stance in the sense that we have gatekeepers distributing positional goods with very little expectation of growth, development, or the cultivation of surprise by those who they reward.
As for me I will place my trust in the weirdo freaks who jumped multiple quintiles in their standardized tests and those who derive growth from instability. Give me a moneyball team of high-variance space oddities and I'll make hay of the elites.