Given that we are currently in the middle of a recession I have been thinking alot over the last year about how we can possibly increase the economic output of the U.S.. One major place I have been looking is the workforce. If you ever talk to employers or professors they will often cite that the thing that really makes or breaks a company in many cases is the quality of it's employees. Since in general we need to measurably increase the economic output of the U.S. in order to deal with problems like paying for scoical security I would like to suggest a solution. How about we try to change the personality characteristics of the population in order to maximize economic output? If you look at personality characteristics in terms of work there are many personality characteristics that are beneficial for many jobs. For instance, I recently read a study that found a strong relationship between being and inuitor and doing well in engineering courses.
Here is the paper from the journal of engineering education.
http://www.ijee.ie/articles/Vol14-5/ijee1039.pdf
So since we repeatedly hear we need more people pursuing Science Technology Engineering , And Math (STEM) fields we should probably take this result into consideration. Especially since intuitors are relatively a small percentage of the overall population. Intuitors only make up about 20% of the population. Maybe what we really need to do is significantly increase that percentage to greatly increase STEM capability. Maybe what we should do is engage in a research program that finds ways to makes people adopt intuitor characteristics. In the past we have tried to fit jobs to people. Maybe instead we should change people so they better fit into jobs. This may very well increase the overall wealth of the country. We may be able to take this one step further. Supposedly almost all Fortune 500 CEOs are ENTJ. ENTJs are calculated risk takers who have a inate drive to make great things happen at all levels of organizations. They have the following traits which make them very attractive in the workplace
- Naturally hierarchical on the basis of merit.
- Naturally are very driven to achieve goals.
- Naturally find creative solutions to problems.
- Adaptable to a wide variety of work
- Natural learners able to pick up new skills as required by work needs.
- Have a get things done attitude.
- Can operate with a minimum of instruction and do not need details to execute tasks.
- Have less of a tendency to over-think and over-analyse problems.
- Tend to be willing to self-sacrifce for the greater good of the job.
Brief mention of the ENTJ as CEO
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-46940101/thinking-of-getting-an-mba-here-are-five-reasons-not-to/
If we really wanted to make the economic output of the U.S. rise it would stand to reason that it wouldn't hurt to start out if we could just start producing more ENTJs or turn alot of the people we already have into ENTJs. ENTJs are pretty rare. They are only 2-4% of the population. Imaging the possibilities if we could up that number to 50% of the population! The U.S. would have a massive economic edge on the rest of the world. Innovation would go through the roof! Economic output would skyrocket and my guess is alot more project would get completed on time and on budget. Furthermore I suspect there may be a super-linear effect here. I postulate that economic output does not scale linearly with number of entjs. My guess is rate of increase of economic output increases proportionally with number of ENTJs which would mean economic output could potentially increase exponentially or something super-linear. Then as time goes on we could tweak by producing appropriate numbers of other personalities as needed such as INTJ or INTP.
One advantage of such a research program would be that it would be very easy to measure whether or not the program was working. All we would have to do is see how the gross doemstic product was being influenced over time. If it were increasing that would mean it's working. Really simple.
So maybe we need to get to work on investing in this research program. Breakthroughs in neuroscinece and psychology would probably help make this happen. Then we could take children in elementary school and make ENTJicising them part of the standard curriculum. A large percentage of the children would go through a program that essentially changes their cognitive preferences to that of an ENTJ. There are probably a variety of avenues we could explore to make this happen. They would be Extroverted Thinking - introverted Intuition machines. Math and science scores would go through the roof! Everyone would be better off because we would have more money. If something can't be measured it doesn't exist right, so it seems like the way to go.
Not a whole lot that could go wrong with that, seems like it could be a good idea?
???
One step close to Utopia in the Thomas More sense ;-)
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