Contrary to Vivek Ramaswamy, America Is A Refuge from Mediocrity

Contrary to Vivek Ramaswamy, America Is A Refuge from Mediocrity

A very strange but necessary debate about H1B visas is taking place on Twitter/X. With a wave of previously unknown accounts thrown into the mix and lead by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, tech MAGA is arguing in favor of the program as it is currently administered while traditionalist MAGA is against. Although the debate does not feel organic, that this kind of division would surface is inevitable because H1B practices need an urgent overhaul — even against the wishes of Silicon Valley overlords.

As it’s currently used, H1B onshores not any kind of unique talent, but run-of-the-mill programmers whom we can train stateside and who, in fact, already exist here. Ramaswamy ignited a firestorm claiming that somehow that’s just not in the cards:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.

Unfortunately, too many Americans are willing to accept these kinds of arguments. Not only it is objectively not true that the generation raised on Saved by The Bell did not produce quality programmers, but Ramaswamy’s argument is likely handicapped by selection bias.

I was a part of the brain drain from the USSR, and I can assure you that foreign lands are not full of Brahmins and Mandarins. Because from colonial days on, America had no problem attracting foreign elites, be it the Puritans or the White Russians, many people here get the impression that everyone abroad is smart. This impression is cemented because the prominent foreigners — the kind we are most likely to be see — are above average. Also because, being foreigners, they possess a different kind of knowledge. For instance, some viewers were impressed with Russian president’s Vladimir Putin’s command of Russian history that he showcased in Tucker Carlson’s interview early this year, but is it at all surprising that a Russian man with a higher education knows the basics of Russian history? What’s more surprising is that the future Russian president likely purchased his master’s diploma — but that’s a whole different story.

Stiffening anti-intellectualism defined Soviet life from the start. Communist ideology lent itself very easily to uravnilovka, the derogatory slang for forced equality. Though arguably it fit neatly into the perennial condition of the Russian peasant community, or mir, uravnilovka was injected into society during the Bolshevik revolution when wealth was redistributed, decimating not only the rich, but middle class intelligentsia.

Forced redistribution is the theme of Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 novella Heart of A Dog in which the protagonist named Preobrazhensky, a sophisticated, accomplished and respected in his circle professor of medical science, clashes with an uncouth proletarian Sharikov. Backed by the power of the state, Sharikov feels entitled to live on Preobrazhensky’s property and run his life — after all, if everyone is equal and his host’s excellence is nothing but a source of irritation.

Although in less than a generation, Joseph Stalin set up a managerial class with its own distribution networks and neo-bourgeois habits — the wives of the party bosses were to be homemakers, for instance — the ideological underpinnings of the Soviet life didn’t change significantly. Ordinary workers were to be equal to each other, meaning everybody got paid about the same amount. In a workplace, uravnilovka produced downward pressure on productivity because it removed the impetus to excel. It was fundamentally anti-intellectual: school grades were given on merit which, at least in theory, determined college admissions and work appointments, academic success had little bearing on future earnings.

Moreover, for the duration of Soviet history, Soviet intelligentsia felt besieged by the dual force of state repressions and popular animus. On one hand, for all of their self-congratulation about culturing the masses, the Communist Party tolerated no dissent and advanced a highly conformist aesthetic. Dissidents found themselves targets of prosecution. On the other hand, the party cadres periodically whipped up popular anti-intellectual fervor — the most notorious case was the haunting of Boris Pasternak. The writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for his 1957 novel Doctor Zhivago, which was banned in the USSR. In order to force him to refuse the award, the authorities promoted a letter to the editor campaign. Concerned citizens reassured newspapers that they didn’t read the book, but they knew why it was bad. The message implanted in the heads of the Soviet subjects: reading and thinking for oneself is trouble.

Soviet life rewarded a good degree of aggression. But it’s not just that the mild-mannered nerds didn’t punch their way through the line to the meat counter — the failure that earned them nothing but contempt of your average zhlob, or a dimwit — the material conditions of workers of mind labor were far from ideal. After years of study, an average engineer was no better off than a menial worker, not because of market demands, but because of how the state valued their efforts. On top of it, the Soviet economy provided little in the way of career opportunities. A late 70’s folk rock song by the biggest underground star of the era Boris Grebenshchikov starts of “I am an engineer for 100 rubles [a month]/and will never get more than that.”

Soon after he wrote the track, Grebenshchikov was kicked out of that job for playing rock-n-roll and, to his own great satisfaction, found janitorial work. That gig went along with his creative endeavors. Whether or not Soviet intelligentsia withdrew into marginal occupations, intellectual life was largely driven underground.

Official culture was most appealing to the — at best — mediocre. Soviet uravnilovka meant that everyone had to be the same materially and intellectually and since most people couldn’t achieve excellence, the few who could had to be cut down. That applied to any sphere of life. “What are you, better than everyone?” a familiar jealous saying went.

A look at the people who excelled under socialism filled the hearts of intelligentsia with dread. The midlevel managerial class was not particularly sophisticated and the Politburo was visibly subpar. Bolsheviks were among the best educated people of their time, but after Stalin eliminated them, mediocrity ascended. On account of her humble educational background, the one time Minister of Culture Yekaterina Furtseva was nicknamed the Weaver by the artists she supervised.

Until the very recent introduction of woke into American society, nothing as aggressively equalizing as uravnilovka existed in the United States. I know that because immigration allowed many people in my community to realize their potential stateside. It’s not that anti-intellectualism doesn’t exist in the U.S., but there is place here for different kinds of people, including those in STEM.

If American students today are in no rush to get into technical fields, it’s only in part due to the contemptible state of our education. Americans are smart — few are willing to spend college years buried in the library to get into a field where the wages are undercut by foreign labor.

If in the future we will curtail H1B abuses, it shouldn’t be too hard to replace them with domestic workers. Most of programming jobs require not four-year degrees but certifications that are relatively cheap and don’t take too long to obtain. During the late 90’s DotCom boom quite a few American kids learned to code because markets asked for it. If Ramaswamy met them in high school a few years earlier, he wouldn’t occur to him that they are any kind of intellectuals. Many were, of course, but they really didn’t need to be to fill these positions.

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