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He was a rolling stone in those days; his low rating gave him little tenure; and he himself has confessed that, while he could receive messages pretty well, as an apprentice he was very poor at sending. In most cases he was fired, either because he was not amenable to office discipline, or was at times inattentive to his duties. He might cut in on the manager’s own wire because he thought the message he was sending was more urgent. Or he would let outgoing messages pile up on the hook above his telegraph table for hours on end while he drew diagrams or read a book.58 Sometimes while he was receiving messages an idea came to him; Edison would signal the out-of-town operator to stop sending, draw out his notebook, jot down some notes, and then tell the operator to resume. Another cause of trouble was his continual monkeying with some paraphernalia or “invention” that would make the routine work of telegraphy less irksome or allow it to be done more expeditiously. Finally, his disposition to play practical jokes on people by means of some gadget of his own devising was as marked as ever. All this overflow of playful activity derived, in part, from inward compulsions he himself scarcely understood, or from buried resentments or frustrations; in part, also from an irrepressible, though awkwardly directed, passion to contrive, to discover, to create, and, in short, to invent.
And finally, our work in our own backyard has made the need abundantly clear. More than 8.5 million people live in New York City. In the 2013 Democratic primary for mayor, just 691,000 people voted. The winner—Bill de Blasio—captured 282,000 votes, and as the Democrat, the general election was a fait accompli. As a result, de Blasio was effectively elected with 282,000 votes in a city of 8.5 million people. He knows that, and his governance has been solely designed to appeal to those 282,000 people, even at the expense of the other 8.2 million. The same thing happened again in 2017, with de Blasio winning 320,000 votes in the Democratic primary and effectively again capturing the mayoralty as a result. This is not an anomaly, nor is it exclusive to members of one party or one jurisdiction. It’s exactly how candidates are elected—and then govern—across the country at every level of government—municipal, county, state, federal—in every branch of government (executive, legislative, and, in many places, judicial).
The Flynn effect—the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century—has now been documented in more than thirty countries. The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.
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