Paul Graham answers some reader letters about his What You Can’t Say in Re: What You Can’t Say:
I disagree with your generalization that physicists are smarter than professors of French Literature.Actually, for illustrative purposes I did include a few things you can’t say, but I stuck to domain-specific ones. Within university faculties, this is the great unmentionable. And look at how much trouble I got in for bringing it up.
Try this thought experiment. A dictator takes over the US and sends all the professors to re-education camps. The physicists are told they have to learn how to write academic articles about French literature, and the French literature professors are told they have to learn how to write original physics papers. If they fail, they’ll be shot. Which group is more worried?
We have some evidence here: the famous parody that physicist Alan Sokal got published in Social Text. How long did it take him to master the art of writing deep-sounding nonsense well enough to fool the editors? A couple weeks?
What do you suppose would be the odds of a literary theorist getting a parody of a physics paper published in a physics journal?
How can you dismiss socialism so casually
I’ve thought a lot about this, actually; it was not a casual remark. I think the fundamental question is not whether the government pays for schools or medicine, but whether you allow people to get rich.
In England in the 1970s, the top income tax rate was 98%. That’s what the Beatles’ song “Tax Man” is referring to when they say “one for you, nineteen for me.”
Any country that makes this choice ends up losing net, because new technology tends to be developed by people trying to make their fortunes. It’s too much work for anyone to do for ordinary wages. Smart people might work on sexy projects like fighter planes and space rockets for ordinary wages, but semiconductors or light bulbs or the plumbing of e-commerce probably have to be developed by entrepreneurs. Life in the Soviet Union would have been even poorer if they hadn’t had American technologies to copy.
Finland is sometimes given as an example of a prosperous socialist country, but apparently the combined top tax rate is 55%, only 5% higher than in California. So if they seem that much more socialist than the US, it is probably simply because they don’t spend so much on their military.