Value of education and religion

by philg

J.R. Simplot, the architect of the modern American diet and major supplier of frozen french fries to McDonald’s, died peacefully at age 99, leaving a fortune estimated at $3.6 billion in 2007. According to Wikipedia, he was an atheist who dropped out of school during the eighth grade.

6 thoughts on “Value of education and religion”

  1. Phil,
    Depending on what you believe, Mr. Simplot may/may not be finding out the true value of religion right about now.

  2. Are you suggesting that one’s worth to the world is accurately measured in how much money you die with? Perhaps if he’d been properly educated and had more of a conscience, he would’ve done something more useful, though perhaps less lucrative, with his life than cutting up potatoes.

  3. JB: It is quite conceivable that if Simplot had gone to an expensive college he would have become a Mother Theresa-like figure, dedicating his life to helping the unfortunate, like so many other graduates of our nation’s elite universities. Indeed one hears of very few MIT or Harvard graduates who apply for jobs at investment banks.

    Getting more and better education might have helped Mr. Simplot develop the conscience that you say he needed. Jeff Skilling and many of his colleagues at Enron were Harvard graduates. Ken Lay, Enron’s chairman, had a Ph.D.

    As for religion, some of America’s larger churches teach prosperity theology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology ). Had J.R. Simplot joined one of these churches, do you suppose that they would have concluded that Jesus wanted him to change his line of work?

  4. I think the emphasis here should be on the value of education. Imagining a normal distribution of achievement, in my experience, the traditionally educated seem to fill the vast middle, while the high/low tails tend to be populated by the drop-outs.

  5. I think Simplot saw God in a potato. I know I do, especially with sour cream and bacon on the potato.

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