this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
It’s not hyperbole, this is an actual serious issue in America. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not have high enough reading skills to extrapolate and cross reference data from things like text books and journal articles. Something like 40% of American adults can’t read well enough to comprehend multi-step prompts (e.g. they struggle with stuff like bus schedules). About 15-20% of American adults can’t read at a basic level, very simple things like medicine bottles. Depending on the survey these numbers can vary a bit
Part of this statistic is because we have a high immigrant population that doesn’t speak English as their primary language but the main reason is that we’ve simply eroded education quality for decades. I work with teenagers who are in high school and can barely throw together a coherent email. Statistically, most adults don’t read for pleasure at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Look under “literacy rates” section
Let's not blame the immigrants for this.
First, there is no official language of the US. Literacy tests can be administered in Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, or whatever language the subject predominantly uses.
Second, the US does not have unusually high ratio of immigrant. That's a lie that had been created by right-wing bigots. The US is about 14% immigrant, which is not unusual compared to European countries.
Anecdotally, most of the complete dipshits I know are born in the US. The people that manage to immigrate are the individuala who can read and write well enough to understand immigration documents (with the help of a lawyer), and have a decent chunk of money, or necessary skillset to sustain their finances in the US.
“Terrible” is a threshold that can move, though. You can bang on about “half the world is below average” until you’re blue in the face but you will still always miss the point that the average should be much higher than it is and the spread should be nearly as wide. There will be a rough limit to intelligence at some point but the US, for all its resources and money, still seems more interested in finding the lower limit than the upper one.
Definitely valid point. Were are aiming way too low as a nation. It’s ok for people to fail and we should be rewarding people for over achieving. Not the opposite.
Aiming low because it’s easy to hit, which is necessary when the punishment for not hitting is being stripped of everything that can make you safe and secure(money and private insurance, in that system). People are terrified and it’s 33/33/33 if they use that fear to fight for others, fight against everyone else, or shove their heads in the sand and pretend there’s nothing they can do about it. Oddly enough there’s also a spike in test scores and shit because competition for jobs has gotten so fierce, but at the same time bad management isn’t doing anything of real value with that talent and all it’s really doing is hurting everyone.
People don’t even actually need a reward for over-achieving, either. Most people will happily do it for their own pride and for the thrill of doing it. The issue is more that they are burnt out and rightfully not willing to put in the extra effort if their manager is just going to take the credit and they’ll watch their shitty raise, if they get one, still be outpaced by inflation year over year. Give me safety and a real life and I’ll do the rest for free; threaten me and you’ll be lucky I don’t direct that energy toward plucking your fucking eyes out.
Thank you for pointing this out, and also for doing it in a politer way than I was able to above.