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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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5% of the population was not institutionalized in 1968. That doesn’t pass the sniff test.

I appreciate the reality check. I asked Perplexity AI for an estimate of the total number of institutionalized people in US in 1960s, including prisons, mental institutions and institutions for the mentally impaired. The peak for mental institutions was half-a-million a decade earlier (so about 0.3% of the population), the prison population was less than it is now, but as for the mentally disabled:

The search results do not provide specific numbers for institutions housing people with intellectual disabilities (then referred to as "mental retardation") in the 1960s. However, these institutions were common at the time, often housing large numbers of individuals.

I know several institutions for the mentally disabled within my area. They range from assisted living to full-on can't-go-outside-without-an-escort (for those who are mobile). They tend to be out of the way, and people who don't have family members (or family members of their close friends) tend not to think about these places.

So I am going to guess that a large portion of the bottom-10%-IQ were indeed in some form of institution that would take them out of consideration of the labor force participation metric.

I would be open to evidence that it was common for mentally challenged men to get hired and work. Maybe with a lower minimum wage, it makes sense. My friend's sister, for example, works at a doggie day-care for like half the federal minimum wage, something like 20 hours a week.

Note that there were more actually literally retarded people at the time due to a higher rate of birth defects.

My guess is that it was pretty common for actually literally retarded people living mostly with relatives to do some unskilled grunt work(eg field hand, heavy laborer- there was still a lot of unmechanized agriculture and ditch digging going on). McNamara’s morons had to come from somewhere, and I’m guessing looking into it might give us a better idea- it seems unlikely the military was recruiting from long term care homes. But we really don’t know.

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