Pockets of Competents

I'm in my 50s now and I've lived among a handful of different cohorts of people. The type of people I grew up with and now live around are weirdly, consistently "competent". The neighbors I have, for example, are high-end competent people in their work and hobbies. One of my neighbors is a blacksmith as a retirement hobby, plus he also designed and built his home and used to be a VP at a tool company. Another of my neighbors has a bunch of excavating equipment, but he's a high-end tech guy at a local tech company.

Most of the people I grew up with are like those dudes. They had a job, but also are good at hobby stuff or general life skills. They can fix anything in their house, their car, whatever. Even if they aren't super handy and hands-on they know enough to make decisions about paying a contractor.

As I lived with and interacted with different cohorts of people in my adult life, I came to realize that high functioning, high competence people are rare, and the high-competence generalist types are unicorn rare. A more common high competence type is a specialist who doesn't know about anything else. For example, a person might be a doctor, or a scientist with a PhD in some science field, but they don't understand or know anything about plumbing in a house. In fact, they have a lot of pride in their ignorance and imagine they're a "prince" or "princess" who can't be bothered to know about a septic tank or house wiring.

It's manifestly obvious to me now that those generalist competent people are the best to live near or work with. That habit of understanding all the things is associated with humility. An arrogant, status seeker type will imagine that it's "beneath them" to do manual labor, if you pile up a bunch of those people in the same place, you'll get major dysfunction and unchecked corruption and endless malinvestment.

If those generalist competent people understood "we're rare" they could all get together consciously. My neighborhood, though, happened through an "unconscious" sorting process. I got here through a few criteria. Low tax. Lots of land. Few neighbors. Low regulation. Relatively high property price. Remove any of those criterion, and it'd be a different mix of people. Like, remove high property price and maybe you get rednecks instead of gentleman farmer types, or add high regulation and you get the suburban housecat type of people who are more likely to be the specialist type.