On the surface, this Boston Globe op-ed exposes a painful truth about the admissions process and the illusion of meritocracy. Read between the lines, however, and another story emerges: that of the primacy of data mining in modern social analysis, especially when coupled with striking visualizations. The ever-popular Trendalyzer is an iconic example; by combining the standard Cartesian plane with colour and size, this simple tool manages to intuitively display correlations over four dimensions.

How could one visualize the columnist's point? The truth of college admissions, IQ tests, and SAT scores is one of socioeconomic distinction - and therefore of geography. If we were to take census data, combine them with popular university rankings (yeah, these are Canadian examples; I'm sure readily-accessible US datasets exist), and display the whole mess by region (postal code, neighbourhood, riding/electoral district, etc.), we might get a clearer picture of the distinction. I think very few of us would be surprised to find significant correlation between socioeconomic condition and tertiary education.

This raises a burning question: how much human creative potential is being wasted? Put another way, what is the estimated efficiency of education? If you follow Daly's reasoning in arguing that resource scarcity will forcing us to transition from growth to development, then this question becomes central to policy on everything from electrical power to brainpower.

To further pursue this thought: it might turn out that policy is an insufficient tool for developing the required infrastructure. There, I said it.

Governments might be near-irrelevant to our creative future.

And why not? Smart power and traffic grids, social networking, crowdsourcing...the list goes on; and every last one backed by cold, hard data gathered not by government-affiliated agencies but by private enterprise. Government is losing the data battle by a wide margin, with scant evidence that they have any clue how to catch up.

Hold on to your hats. The next few decades should be interesting.