When I asked him how his outfit smuggled drugs from Juárez to El Paso, he looked at me as if I were a child and said, “We use members of the Border Patrol and of the U.S. Army.

While experts cite a host of reasons for the upsurge, they agree on one thing: the bugs, which were mostly eradicated in this country at midcentury by now-banned pesticides like DDT but remained a constant scourge overseas, are finding their way back to the United States through an increase in global travel.

For whatever reason, the pundits think that “English majors lose, engineering wins” in the age of Google. But, if all of my useless liberal arts education has thought me anything, it’s that wealth and power come from distinguishing yourself from the rabble, not joining them. The engineers are not going to be the new power elite (technocrats never have, even when they were just called bureaucrats), instead the engineers are going to form a new working class. Truthfully, this isn’t a shocking claim, even today an engineer can live merely a comfortable life, that’s it. Being a Luddite is surely not the path to riches, but soft skills combined with all those usual markers of the rich (pre-existing capital, etc), is going to play an increasing role in separating the elite from the rest.

If the pundits are speaking any truth—-the death of the long form book, careful analytical thinking—-then we should expect a new priestly class of people who went to elite liberal arts schools and possess the rarest of rare skills: the ability to think.