Vivek Is Intellectually Right (Partially) and Fundamentally Wrong About America

Trump needs Vivek to be better. America needs him to be better. Ohio needs him to be better.

In an X post yesterday, Vivek Ramaswamy decided it was time to lecture Americans with some “hard truths” about why tech companies seek foreign born and first-generation engineers over Joe and Jane American. I wish Vivek had a right-hand person that would filter some of his utterances before he makes them, as he often makes valid points, but those valid points get lost in offensive, half-baked, or just plain erroneous thoughts on America. Vivek needs to exercise more humility given the advantages given to him by his highly-educated, upper-class immigrant parents. They could afford to send him to elite schools, surround him with tutors (if needed), and put him in tennis classes. Most American parents simply don’t have those types of resources so simply do the best they can.

Before diving too deeply into the tech bias for Asian and Indian engineers, keep in mind that India contains 700 million poor souls who still defecate outside and China possesses hundreds of millions of illiterate folks. America may be increasingly obese, satisfied, and consumerist, but at least nearly 100% of our people use indoor plumbing and can read (even if at a 3rd grade level). And, the world’s best companies largely are American companies built by Americans, run by Americans, and staffed by Americans. With more than a billion people in India and China, it becomes a sheer numbers game; meaning, the top 10% of one billion people equals 100,000,000, so India and China together have roughly 200,000,000 highly educated and highly performing men and women, which is more than half the population of the entire United States. Thus, both countries can spare 1,000,000 each for American tech jobs without missing a beat given most of the companies in those countries are nothing burgers.

Why is that given how smart they are, Vivek? Maybe there is something unique about America that allows it to be the great country it is. Maybe that something allowed penniless men like Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt to go toe-to-toe with born-on-third-base J.P. Morgan 150 years ago and still allows the adopted middle class Steve Jobs to battle with the upper class Bill Gates from the 1980s through the 2000s. Sure, America doesn’t produce tons of wicked smart software engineers, but it doesn’t need to. It just needs for a few of our risktakers with good ideas to start companies to drive our and the world’s economy forward. Equally importantly, it needs an economy that creates the pathway for those who work hard and play by the rules to have a decent, financially secure middle class life. The problem isn’t too many sleepovers and too few tutors. The problem is too few opportunites for the majority of Americans seeking what their parents had.

At any rate, I’m old enough to remember Amy Chua’s 2011 book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, that tried to make the case that Chinese moms were far superior than American moms. Ironically, Chua befriended J.D. Vance at Yale Law School and laid the path for his book deal on Hillbilly Elegy. Vivek may have been part of Chua’s “we do it better” caucus at Yale. Chua raised her daughters very closely to how Vivek wants American parents to raise their kids. As I read her book, her kids’ lives were bleak, depressing, and highly regimented. All of Chua’s hardcore parenting (“[no sleepovers], six hours of practicing an instrument each day, threats of burning stuffed animals, admitted verbal abuse, and little room for fun or relaxing") resulted in her daughters becoming: successful tech entrepreneurs? Nope. Innovative tech engineers or rocket scientists? Nope. Neurosurgeons? Nope. Childhoods devoid of fun and normalcy raised by two type-A lawyers produced two more type-A lawyers. Awesome. America needs more damn type-A lawyers...

Look, intellectually Vivek is right. America’s K-12 education system is drowning in mediocrity. Some of that mediocrity comes from unionized teachers who get paid the same no matter what they teach or how effective they are in the classroom, thereby undermining the idea that we should pay physics and math teachers far more than physical education and health teachers and root pay in merit and classroom outcomes. Some of the mediocrity comes from school districts who pass students who shouldn’t be passed resulting in high school graduates who read and do math at a 3rd grade level. Some of the mediocrity, however, comes from helicopter parents who demand their mediocre kids get high grades simply for trying. These parents have led to a system in which grades are heavily inflated. My kids’ school district produces graduates in which 53% exit with a 3.5 GPA or higher, which defies a normal bell curve distribution. You really have to work hard to fail in high school in America when the system allows you to retake tests routinely.

Vivek’s prescription to these problems is wrong. It blames parents for 100% of the problem and fails to acknowledge what Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein identified in their book, The Bell Curve. America’s top 10% only produces 33,000,000 workers to do the work in the world’s greatest economy in the U.S. companies that feed, entertain, educate, cure, and secure the world. When corporate America decided to outsource manufacturing and other key parts of the U.S. economy to India and China, they cut the legs out of the bottom 75% of American workers who don’t possess the IQ needed to do many of the things required by America’s top industries. Those Americans were left holding two empty bags: trapped in an education system that doesn’t work and in an economy with few avenues to the middle class. That is a hard truth.

With an empty bag in each hand for the last two decades, Americans became hopeless, angry, and addicted. Donald Trump won in 2016 and again in 2024 because the very Americans whose parents let them have sleepovers, couldn’t afford tutors or tennis lessons, watched too much television, ate too much junk, and overdosed on opioids believed passionately he would do right by them by fixing what the elite Ivy League leaders in corporate American and politics broke. Vivek doesn’t seem to understand that part. Main Street America wouldn’t give a shit about corporate America importing as many Asian and Indian tech engineers as they wanted in order to create the amazing software code for the products they use if they, too, got their slice of the American Dream, but that isn’t what is happening. Vivek’s parents and their kids in Cincinnati got the American Dream. Their American peers in Youngstown, Canton, Toledo, Dayton, Akron, and Cleveland got pink slips, failing schools, and Medicaid. Instead of lecturing Americans on how to parent better, Vivek should focus on helping Trump fix the U.S. economy so that all boats rise, not just the top 10% of smart kids or the smart immigrants from China and India.

And for the record, Screech wasn’t a smart nerd. He was a borderline moron who constantly did moronic things. Perhaps Vivek’s parents should have let him watch a little more television so he could root his American stereotypes in facts, not more stereotypes. Vivek sometimes sounds like the kid in high school and college who frequently told people “they’d work for him someday.” We all knew that kid. It is time for Vivek to be better than that kid. Trump needs him to be better. America needs him to be better. Ohio needs him to be better.