By PharmaHeretic

In an older post, I wrote about how the current generation of political “leaders” in western countries are parasitic PMC-types without any redeeming qualities. What makes this phenomenon especially interesting is that other institutions and areas in the west have seen an identical degradation in their abilities, and over same period of time. This manifests itself in numerous and diverse ways ranging from the inability to build large-scale physical infrastructure or perform scientific research which leads to real advances in quality of life to delusional bureaucrats trying to ban automobiles with internal combustion engines or mandate incredibly stupid policies on topics ranging from farming to hiring people in corporations. While there are those who want to believe that this is all part of a carefully orchestrated masterplan to “destroy the west “, the diverse and ever-expanding list of institutional fails and delusions is much easier to explain if you are willing to accept the possibility that this the result of a systemic trend with considerable support from a significant part of those societies.

To help you better understand what I am talking about, let us initially restrict this discussion to a specific area, namely recruitment into medical school. I am also using this example because the nature of my education and real job allowed me to observe the shifts in this area years before I noticed them elsewhere. So let us start with the observation that first led me to this realization. It began with an interesting pattern about the type of people who were doctors and faculty and medical schools in the late 1990s versus the people they were teaching or supervising. See.. prior to the early- or mid- 1990s (or so it seems), the profile of people who entered medical school was quite different from the types who followed that path from those who did it subsequently. The previous cohort was almost exclusively made up of people who were fairly geeky, not especially socially adept and almost exclusively drawn from the upper-middle class to middle-class. Sure.. there were a few rich kids and some from the working class, but it was mostly academically good and fairly geeky kids from a milquetoast white-collar middle-class background.

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