Meritocracy and Its Discontents

 

shutterstock_228878062Toby Young — British education reformer, food critic, self-described “anarcho-cynicalist,” man-about-town, and frequent denizen of Radio Free Delingpole – has an interesting and timely article in the current issue of the Australian journal Quadrant, titled The Fall of the Meritocracy. The title is misleading: it would be more aptly titled “The Total and Complete Triumph of the Meritocracy.” Regardless, it is a worthwhile read.

The article makes plain that, far from being an unalloyed public good, meritocracy is seriously flawed as an organizing principle for society. Young’s basic argument is straightforward: because the traits associated with success are highly heritable, and because successful people increasingly marry and breed with each other, an efficiently meritocratic society like ours will have less and less social mobility and, over time, result in an entrenched class system far more rigid and permanent than anything that existed before the mid-20th century. This process is already well advanced in Britain and the United States. Not to worry though: Young has a highly original solution to this problem and ends on a somewhat upbeat note.

Tobes is certainly right about the trends. After WWII, Americans created a highly efficient engine for sorting people according to IQ and channeling them, by means of the university admission system, into different social strata. The civil rights revolution opened up this system to women and minorities. Seventy years later, the result is hyperactive social sorting by IQ, and the consequent emergence of a distinctive meritocratic elite, separated from the rest by ever-greater social, economic, and cultural distance.

Others have written about this elite before, including David Brooks (amusingly and sympathetically) and Charles Murray and Robert Putnam (despairingly). But to my knowledge, no one has systematically thought through the social and political implications of the enormous transformation being wrought by the workings of the meritocratic sorting machine. The near-certainty of the emergence of a Hereditary Meritocracy, and society’s hardening into a rigid and self-perpetuating caste system, has grave implications for our political order. It may be the most significant social transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, and it will make both democratic government and the nation state obsolete and irrelevant.

As for Toby’s proposed solution, unfortunately it won’t work. Moreover, he understates the case against meritocracy: it’s much worse than he thinks. If you are a Classical Liberal, there are no grounds for optimism here, only for more resignation and gloom (as if any more were needed).

The Trouble with Meritocracy

What Churchill said of democracy probably also applies to meritocracy: it’s the worst possible system, except for all the others. Still, it is generally underappreciated just how bad it is.

The choice for any society is never whether to have an elite, but what kind and how to gain entry. Or, in Lenin’s brutish but pithy formulation: “Who, whom?” To be sure, meritocracy is a fine idea in theory. Everyone wants to know that he has a fair shot in life, and that his chances won’t be diminished by accidental and irrelevant circumstances of birth. We celebrate the man who rises in the world by his own wits and hard work, and his reward is well deserved. But for society as a whole, it is no panacea: no matter what group is on top, its members will have ordinary human virtues and vices, as well as those particular to that group.

The main thing to understand about meritocracy is that it is not government by the best, most virtuous, or wisest; it is government by the worldly, ambitious, and energetic, which is something slightly different. It is a common ontological error to conflate intelligence and wisdom. These are, in fact, two totally separate categories that overlap only somewhat. Of course, we want certain professions to be purely meritocratic: fighter pilots, brain surgeons, shortstops, etc. But leadership is largely a matter of moral intelligence and authority, which do not always correspond perfectly with IQ and technical competence. In reality, high intelligence and moral imbecility are not only not mutually exclusive, I would bet the correlation is actually slightly positive.

The reason we know intelligence does not immunize you against moral imbecility is that we are familiar with the 20th century. Sophisticated opinion for most of that century was firmly and systematically on the side of the monsters. It’s not that most intellectuals were actively evil (although many were); it’s that most were, to a depressing degree, morally blind sheep. And if you need any more evidence of the herding instinct of the sophisticated, take a look at the intellectual fugue state called Marxism. That cult had a vise-grip on all the brightest lights for damn near a century and a half. This should tell you 90% of what you need to know about the capacity of the best and brightest for independent thought (the other 10% is supplied by Freudianism). And if tomorrow it’s not Marxism, it’ll be some other depraved genocidal fad. As Orwell observed, some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

Why? Because the smart and sophisticated tend to assume that their intelligence and sophistication ipso facto give them the right to tell other people what to do, what to think and how to live. Therefore, they tend to cluster around systems of thought that operationalize this principle. Mind you, this is not just a 20th century problem, but an Enlightenment problem; smart Rationalists have been trying in vain to institute a Cult of Reason since approximately 1793, and to this day they keep trying to institute it, expecting a different result.

What most people find obnoxious about hereditary aristocracy is that it puts the supposedly undeserving in charge of things. But meritocracy is not much better. How is an extraordinary intellectual, musical, or athletic gift fundamentally more fair than the circumstantial one of inheriting a title and a fortune? Ultimately, it’s just a lottery. Isn’t meritocracy really aristocracy, once removed? Beethoven, Napoleon, and other Enlightenment meritocrats certainly thought so. They thought of themselves explicitly as members of a natural aristocracy of talent.

At least traditional aristocracy had one important safeguard to keep the peasants at bay – the idea of noblesse oblige. This meant that those born into unearned power were supposed to feel some obligation of service toward the rest of us. But when people end up at the top of the greasy pole through what they think are their own efforts, more often than not they end up believing that the world owes them something.

Hereditary Meritocracy

But if ordinary meritocracy is less than perfect, with Hereditary Meritocracy (or HM) we will have the worst of both worlds: entrenched hereditary power and wealth, together with the hubris of the supposedly deserving and entitled. Worse still, HM is totally incompatible with the core principles of Classical Liberalism on which the United States is founded.

The end of equality

America’s main foundational belief is the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal.” This theoretical ideal has always been at odds with the obvious reality of inequality. We reconcile this tension in two ways: first, through the equal application of the laws; and second, by convincing ourselves that the United States is a society without class boundaries, where everyone succeeds or fails strictly according to his abilities. We are a country of self-made men and women: Paul Bunyan, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and many others. We don’t believe in social class, which we regard as something alien and European, or as something dredged up — together with other toxic by catch — by crackpot academics.

But because of the erosion of social mobility, all of this will soon be mere folklore and rumor. Class and inequality are already a permanent feature of the American political landscape. As social stratification takes hold, social and economic inequality will eventually morph into permanent legal inequality, as with any other caste society, from the Guardians of Plato’s Republic to the Brahmins and untouchables of India.

The end of democracy and limited government

Because HM will be radically unequal, it will be able to sustain itself only by a grand bargain, paying off the Plebs and Proles through a massive system of welfare state benefits, entitlements, wealth transfers, inducements, and bribes. The meritocratic elite will control the levers of power — finance, academia, the education establishment, the entertainment industry, the prestige media, the legal profession, the rulemaking bureaucracies (like the late Roman Senate, the elected legislature will be irrelevant) — while the Plebs and Proles will mostly leave them alone, with only occasional minor massacres and mob violence. HM society will be effectively a one-party police state. There will be factions within the elite on minor issues, but it will be mostly monolithic in its basic outlook and worldview, just like it is today. The idea that the role of the state should be limited to preserving ordered liberty within a democratic republic composed of free and equal citizens will be considered antique and incomprehensible, like codpieces and powdered wigs.

The end of the nation state

When Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 1897, English society was defined by class and ruled by a hereditary aristocracy composed of some 300 families. Yet there was no doubt in the minds of the English, from the lowliest stable boy to the Marquess of Salisbury, that they constituted a single people inhabiting a single culture.

HM will be different. Today, a banker in New York has far more in common with a management consultant in Singapore or a lawyer in Dubai than with a soybean farmer in Nebraska or a plumber in Ohio. A Principal Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary in Washington feels more tender love for a 3rd Deputy Director for Banana Curvature Standardization in the European Commission than for an auto mechanic in Tulsa. The future will be like this, only more so. The members of the HM elite will be fully trans-national and cosmopolitan. They will share few common assumptions, beliefs and aspirations with their geographical compatriots from the lower orders, with whom they won’t even be bound by a common system of laws. The elite will regard the Proles and Plebs with a mixture of fear and contempt. They will consequently have no use for the nation state, with its flag-waving, nationalism, and other beastly expressions of folkish unity.

Open immigration will play an important role in the destruction of the nation sate. The HM elite will import foreigners on the pretext of infusing new blood to break the caste system and jump-start social mobility. These efforts will be designed to fail but — in the process of failing — any remaining bonds of national solidarity will be sundered. Open immigration will, however, have the useful side-benefit of splitting the lower orders along ethnic and racial lines, making them easier to control, consistent with classical divide-and-conquer principles.

Our Meritocratic Future

The rise of the meritocracy explains much about our current politics. Every political issue – guns, gay marriage, the Obama presidency, Sarah Palin, abortion, affirmative action, fracking, immigration, healthcare, the war on terror, climate change – is really a battlefield in the class war waged by the rich, urban ruling elite against the lower orders, whom they regard basically as helots. The last seven years offer a small, terrifying glimpse of what government under HM will be like.

Can we escape this fate and save free market capitalism and the American constitutional and legal system that gave it its most robust expression?

Mr. Young does offer a solution: designer babies for the underclass. He notes that science is now very close to being able to screen embryos for intelligence. Once this technology becomes available, Young proposes to offer it free of charge to low-income, low-IQ parents as a form of cognitive redistribution. Such couples could, thereby, choose to bring to term only those embryos that maximize their cognitive genetic potential, rather than leaving it up to chance.

Young realizes that access to this technology would have to be strictly limited to the cognitively disadvantaged. Otherwise, the cognitive elite would use the same technology to their own advantage, thereby maintaining or widening the gap between themselves and the less genetically fortunate. But of course this is impossible. We are talking, after all, about a class of people who will go to great lengths to expose their offspring in utero to Homer, sung in the authentic Old Ionic dialect, in order to give them a leg up on the preschool admissions test. Once the technology Toby describes hits the market, neither law nor God’s wrath will keep it from the grasp of elite parents.

And so we can see that the long historical arc of government in Western societies has a definite trajectory and destination: roving warlord chieftains to hereditary aristocracy to democratic meritocracy to, at last, the broad, sunlit uplands of Hereditary Meritocracy. We are close to the end state of societal evolution, and all of the key pieces are already in place.

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  1. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    I still stand very skeptical of just how heritable IQ is. Certainly it seems to track in families, but that does not mean this trend is genetically ingrained, no more than speaking English is. I think much of the disparities we see today is not the result of our system sorting out smart from slow apples with Teutonic efficiency. Rather I think we have seen that out means of educating children is very haphazard. Those with the economic means to do so will relocate to regions that provide good education. The poor lack this alternative and are forced to make do with bad schools. The smart do not just have smart children. They have children who they then educate vigorously at great personal expense. That active education is what makes their kids smart, certainly what contributes the most to their standing IQ.

    • #1
  2. ctlaw Coolidge
    ctlaw
    @ctlaw

    Valiuth:I still stand very skeptical of just how heritable IQ is. Certainly it seems to track in families, but that does not mean this trend is genetically ingrained, no more than speaking English is. I think much of the disparities we see today is not the result of our system sorting out smart from slow apples with Teutonic efficiency. Rather I think we have seen that out means of educating children is very haphazard. Those with the economic means to do so will relocate to regions that provide good education. The poor lack this alternative and are forced to make do with bad schools. The smart do not just have smart children. They have children who they then educate vigorously at great personal expense. That active education is what makes their kids smart, certainly what contributes the most to their standing IQ.

    What will convince you?

    Studies showing a higher IQ correlation between identical twins than fraternal twins?

    Studies showing a higher than random IQ correlation between siblings raised in different homes (possibly including studies of identical twins raised apart)?

    Studies showing higher correlation with parental IQ of biological children vs. adopted children?

    Studies showing higher correlation between biological siblings vs. non-biological siblings?

    If you look, you probably could find most or all of these.

    • #2
  3. MJBubba Member
    MJBubba
    @

    This whole system magnifies the effects of the hijacking of Big Education by the progressives.   Not only do they indoctrinate our kids to be leftist mother-earth-worshipping know-it-alls, they also have a lock on the gatekeeping process to screen out any tough-minded conservative kids.

    They like to advance the smart kids, but they don’t want kids that are smarter than themselves, and they really don’t want conservative kids or kids who take their religion seriously.   Those kids will find roadblocks in their path to a secure position within the community of elites.

    • #3
  4. David Knights Member
    David Knights
    @DavidKnights

    As the father of two adopted daughters, I also am skeptical about how much of what we call IQ is genetic.  I will say that I think that early nutrition may play a bigger role than anyone realizes.

    • #4
  5. MJBubba Member
    MJBubba
    @

    Your comment regarding moral authority brings to mind a separate issue that I think is related.   We have allowed the IRS to say that pastors may not endorse specific candidates for office, and let the progressives generalize this to the point of keeping the churches out of politics entirely.   It is only the fight over abortion that has drawn churches back into political activity.   The loss of a political voice for the churches has hurt America.

    • #5
  6. Guruforhire Inactive
    Guruforhire
    @Guruforhire

    The problem isn’t with meritocracy.  Its the collapse of a meaningful spots for mid-fielders.

    Average is over.

    • #6
  7. Larry3435 Inactive
    Larry3435
    @Larry3435

    Notwithstanding John’s statistics, it seems unlikely to me that several thousand years of the nature-nurture controversy are going to be put to rest by a thread on Ricochet.

    In addition to my skepticism about the immutable heritability of IQ,  I also have a sneaking suspicion that the college and graduate school admissions process has very little to do with IQ or any other form of merit, and that whatever correlation does exist in that process is getting weaker every year.  Your chances of admission to a “top” university are enhanced far more by lying about your 1/32 Cherokee heritage than by an extra 20 IQ points.

    • #7
  8. David Knights Member
    David Knights
    @DavidKnights

    anonymous:

    I am personally optimistic that before 2050 we will understand the biological basis of intelligence, whatever it may be, and develop the tools to manipulate it. I don’t believe these tools will be restricted to the élite, but rather become available before long to everybody, just as every technology developed in the last century has. This will have the effect of increasing the mean intelligence of the population and perhaps narrowing the standard deviation.

    John, if you are correct, what happens next?  If the population as a whole gets dramatically smarter, what do they do with that intelligence?  Can you see any downsides of a radically smarter population? (Say a mean IQ of 140 as opposed to 100)

    • #8
  9. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Oblomov: The main thing to understand about meritocracy is that it is not government by the best, most virtuous, or wisest; it is government by the worldly, ambitious, and energetic, which is something slightly different.

    Yes, this is my primary beef with the label “meritocracy”. Not that it’s wrong to have an opportunity society where the ambitious and energetic get ahead. No, that’s good.

    But that the prefix “merit” literally does not make sense in this context. Literally, “meritocracy” would be government by those who “merit” – government by the “deserving” (that’s even how Wikipedia defines it). And that doesn’t even make sense.

    Earned success is awesome and all that, and let’s keep cheering it it on. But unearned success and failure are also universals of the human experience. Windfall gains and losses as Sowell puts it.

    No child with Down Syndrome “deserves” to be born that way. Nor did I in any meaningful sense “deserve” to win my awesome spouse – I just got incredibly lucky. Of course, I feel obligated after-the-fact to make an effort to deserve my husband, but that is not the same as having “earned” or “deserved” him outright.

    • #9
  10. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    “intellectual fugue state”

    ?

    • #10
  11. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    anonymous:

    Oblomov: We are a country of self-made men and women: Paul Bunyan, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and many others.

    One small edit: Paul Bunyan is a fictional character.

    I think that’s sort of the point :-)

    • #11
  12. iWe Coolidge
    iWe
    @iWe

    Nature and nurture are all well and good. But in a truly free society, it is our choices, not our genetics, that define us.

    We all know a great many smart, underachieving people – just as we know hard working people who attain outsized achievements.

    Persistence and work ethic, as seen from any survey of world cultures, can be a result of freely-made choices.

    Victimhood stands in diametric opposition to free will.

    • #12
  13. iWe Coolidge
    iWe
    @iWe

    anonymous: because they’ve come to believe that correct theories must be counter-intuitive ones that only they can understand, not the straightforward kind which the general public can grasp.)

    So true! I find this problem in every field: smart people insist that the right explanation must be complicated.

    • #13
  14. David Knights Member
    David Knights
    @DavidKnights

    anonymous:

    I don’t know. I could probably dash off a pretty persuasive dystopia about a world where everybody was about as bright as Ivy League professors, given how attracted so many of them are to pointy-head ideas. (My theory is that very intelligent people are attracted to such notions as communism, post-modernism, etc. because they’ve come to believe that correct theories must be counter-intuitive ones that only they can understand, not the straightforward kind which the general public can grasp.)

    I think you are right in that idea.  Then again, some counter-intuitive ideas really are correct, such as the Invisible Hand and the fact that the greatest good grows out of everyone pursuing their own interests.

    I can certainly see the greatest resistance to artificially increasing the intelligence of everyone coming from the current Ivy League elite.  The thought of them loosing what makes them “special” in their eyes might produce some pretty crazy reasoning to oppose the technology.  Similar to the anti-GMO stuff we see today.

    • #14
  15. Oblomov Member
    Oblomov
    @Oblomov

    Thanks for the comments y’all. Can’t really blog from work. I’ll try to catch up tonite.

    • #15
  16. Merina Smith Inactive
    Merina Smith
    @MerinaSmith

    I’ve been around smart people all my life and must say, some of them have very little common sense.  Anyway, this all sounds like a one world government conspiracy theory and it is right to be very skeptical of those.  Look at the current crop of presidential candidates.  Yes, we have some from political families–Bush and Clinton, but we had family dynasties clear back at the beginning.  Remember the Adamses?  They come and go.  Marco Rubio came from a poor family and has risen to the top.  Yes, by merit, but the point is that merit is not found just in elite families. That mixes things up considerably.  Haven’t merit and luck always been defining factors in people’s lives?

    Another point–history is surprising.  When our nation began, the founders were all gaga about reason and enlightenment.  Jefferson posited that soon everyone would be religious universalists.  Before long, the nation was awash in the second great awakening.  Right now, conservatism is counter-cultural, but that kind of gives me hope.  That and the abject failure of lefty schemes.  When you look back at historical predictions based on current trends, they are nearly always wrong.  We should find that comforting.

    What I fear most right now is actually science unimpeded by religion and ethics.  This brave new world of designer babies strikes me as horrible.

    • #16
  17. Majestyk Member
    Majestyk
    @Majestyk

    OK – here’s a thought experiment then.  I think we would all concede that a society that has a higher proportion of intelligent people is probably preferable to one in which you have a lower proportion.

    Higher intelligence tends to correlate with a lot of positive social outcomes (so much so that I would argue that it crosses the boundary over into causation) such as lower rates of violence higher lifetime incomes and generally less social dysfunction.  Given that this is the case: why don’t we just “bribe” (as you put it) the people at the lower end of the intelligence spectrum to have fewer children?

    The benefits of this are many-fold.  For a reasonably low upfront cost (say, $10,000) paid to a first time, poor, out-of-wedlock mother who is already in the hospital for a state-sponsored c-section we ask her to simultaneously have a tubal ligation.  You thereby permanently prevent all subsequent births to low income (and on average lower IQ) individuals and all of the down-the-road costs which accrue as a result.

    You could simultaneously increase the refundable portion of child tax credits – this would encourage high earners to have more children (at the margin) and thereby increase the proportion of the population which has higher intelligence.

    This would have the effect of democratizing intelligence to a certain extent by increasing society’s average smarts.

    Come at me.

    • #17
  18. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    iWe:Nature and nurture are all well and good. But in a truly free society, it is our choices, not our genetics, that define us…

    Persistence and work ethic, as seen from any survey of world cultures, can be a result of freely-made choices.

    Agreed. It certainly can be. I think you once told us you had a friend who looks upon his ADD medicine as an extension of his work ethic, and that raises an interesting point:

    There are many conservatives who consider success earned by modifying the body in this way “unmerited”. They would say that achieving more because of an ADD drug or overcoming despair with the help of an antidepressant is “unmerited” success. To really deserve success in overcoming such obstacles, you can’t resort to chemical “cop outs”.

    I suspect their attitude is somewhat wrongheaded. Using technology to modify our biochemistry has costs and benefits, obviously. But anyone who’s been around a person in such an anhedonic state (whether “earned” by past behavior or not) that his ability to anticipate, and thus pursue, future rewards is “bizarrely nonexistent”, knows that getting rid of that state (whether through prayer, self-scolding, or yes, even a pill) is highly likely to change that person’s behavior for the better. If a windfall loss that impairs work ethic can be fixed, why not fix it?

    Well, why not fix it if you know how and the benefits of the fix are likely to outweigh the costs?

    • #18
  19. Z in MT Member
    Z in MT
    @ZinMT

    While mental intelligence is largely genetically inheritable, other kinds of traits that make people successful like social intelligence, confidence, leadership, entrepreneurship are nutured. From my experience, having mental intelligence but growing up in lower middle class blue collar household only allows you to become the valued advisor to the elite boss that grew up believing he deserved to be part of the elite.

    • #19
  20. Lazy_Millennial Inactive
    Lazy_Millennial
    @LazyMillennial

    “Regression to the mean” is going to damper a lot of this process, as will the abject idiocy exhibited by many who are raised in wealth.

    In the long run though, education is going to be the key to preventing permanent castes.  And by education, I do NOT mean everyone getting a 4-year undergraduate degree; I mean everyone getting post-high-school accreditation in skills that the market demands.  As the market demand for skills is shifting constantly, this will require people to be “lifelong learners”, constantly learning new skills, frequently attending part-time classes or taking internet courses to stay competitive.  The left is going to scream that this requires government subsidization. Our answer must be that we’ve got to break the stranglehold the higher-education-accreditation boards have on education, and insist on results from education programs (employment, average pay of graduates) be publicly available, so students can accurately gage benefits.

    • #20
  21. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    ctlaw:

    Valiuth:I still stand very skeptical of just how heritable IQ is.

    What will convince you?

    My problems with IQ are several fold. The biggest one is that I don’t really know what is meant by intelligence. As John points out we can define it as just what the test measure, but that is unsatisfying, and I think generally confusing to a wider audience. Clear definitions I think are necessary to even form a test, but if the definition is the test what does that mean? So I think this really hampers studies of IQ. If we can’t agree on what it actually is how can we be sure all these studies are actually testing the same thing?

    As everyone here knows correlation and causation are not the same thing. Furthermore just because a trait has some heritable component does not mean environmental factors aren’t more influential. Taking Johns example of height, we know that malnutrition and disease have very strong effects on this trait. While we can show that height has strong heritable components, that does not mean that when we see a population that is short it means it is just because of their bad genes.

    As a biologist I would also like some idea of an actual mechanism for intelligence. I know of several genetic factors that can influence height. What are they for intelligence?

    I am willing to bet English and a preference for Pizza will also be found to be heritable.

    • #21
  22. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    Great post, so much here…

    I don’t know that hereditary, genetic IQ is the whole thing here.  We learn by making connections.  So, for instance, I take my children to Mount Washington or the Fort Pitt Museum on Saturday afternoon.  On Monday, teacher tells them about George Washington.  Their Saturday experience allows them to make a quicker and more meaningful connection than another child who has never encountered Washington.

    More income means more possible experiences – museums, parks, books, travel, internet, anything really.  Doesn’t have to even be educational.  Each experience adds a peg that new information can hang on.  So all the kids of all IQ levels in the top half will have greater opportunity to maximize their potential than all the kids in the bottom half.

    • #22
  23. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    David Knights:

    anonymous:

    I am personally optimistic that before 2050 we will understand the biological basis of intelligence, whatever it may be, and develop the tools to manipulate it. I don’t believe these tools will be restricted to the élite, but rather become available before long to everybody, just as every technology developed in the last century has. This will have the effect of increasing the mean intelligence of the population and perhaps narrowing the standard deviation.

    John, if you are correct, what happens next? If the population as a whole gets dramatically smarter, what do they do with that intelligence? Can you see any downsides of a radically smarter population? (Say a mean IQ of 140 as opposed to 100)

    Actually you could never have a mean IQ of 140 for the whole population. Because the Mean IQ by definition is set to 100. At least that is my understanding of how IQ works as a measurement.

    • #23
  24. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Z in MT:While mental intelligence is largely genetically inheritable, other kinds of traits that make people successful like social intelligence, confidence, leadership, entrepreneurship are nutured…

    … and also heritable.

    Most personality traits appear to be a mixture of heritability and nurture (including self-nurture – i.e, the choices we make as moral agents). For example, the g of all Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) is reportedly rather high – and to the extent that “conscientiousness” and “work ethic” are similar, that means work ethic is also influenced by raw genetics. (Nor would we reasonably expect the right kind of “nurture” or strong enough “willpower” from an autistic person to yield the same “social intelligence” achievements that some people seem simply “born with”.)

    I think the bigger point is, just because a lot of who we are is beyond our control doesn’t preclude a significant portion of who we are from being in our control. And indeed, what’s in our control is rightfully considered the most meaningful part of who we are, since it’s the only part we can voluntarily change.

    • #24
  25. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    anonymous: I think another force contributing to the stratification into what is effectively a caste system will be what financial analyst James Dines has been calling the “ending of the age of jobs”.  What has been slowly happening, and will accelerate in coming decades, is the replacement of many of the jobs traditionally held by those who are not in the cognitive élite with automation or alternative business models.  Entire classes of employment, both blue- and white-collar, are being eliminated: bank tellers, travel agents, book and record store clerks, etc.

    Guruforhire: The problem isn’t with meritocracy.  Its the collapse of a meaningful spots for mid-fielders.

    Precisely.  This automation is beginning to drive a wedge through the middle.

    Right now, each truck has a driver.  Once trucks can drive themselves, or at least follow a lead truck, there will only be a need for one driver/logistics manager for every 2 or 3 or 4 trucks.  So the drivers with those skills will move up over the wedge and those who don’t will be pushed down below.  There will no longer be a slow blending as we move from low to middle to high.  There will just be low and high.

    • #25
  26. Valiuth Member
    Valiuth
    @Valiuth

    anonymous:

    I don’t know. I could probably dash off a pretty persuasive dystopia about a world where everybody was about as bright as Ivy League professors, given how attracted so many of them are to pointy-head ideas. (My theory is that very intelligent people are attracted to such notions as communism, post-modernism, etc. because they’ve come to believe that correct theories must be counter-intuitive ones that only they can understand, not the straightforward kind which the general public can grasp.)

    I would say the allure to communism is because people in general have problems of accepting the idea that things happen without agency. That there is a single intelligence behind every action, and that intelligence chooses to fire people, crash the market, kill the dinosaurs, let people be poor, make someone rich, etc. Intelligent fools convince themselves that they have discovered the intelligences that do all of these things and then believe that they can supplant them.

    • #26
  27. Songwriter Inactive
    Songwriter
    @user_19450

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake:

    anonymous:

    Oblomov: We are a country of self-made men and women: Paul Bunyan, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and many others.

    One small edit: Paul Bunyan is a fictional character.

    I think that’s sort of the point :-)

    Perhaps – but a fictional character is the very definition of one who is not self-made, but rather created by someone else. Right? :)

    • #27
  28. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Songwriter:

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake:

    anonymous:

    Oblomov: We are a country of self-made men and women: Paul Bunyan, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and many others.

    One small edit: Paul Bunyan is a fictional character.

    I think that’s sort of the point :-)

    Perhaps – but a fictional character is the very definition of one who is not self-made, but rather created by someone else. Right? :)

    Right, and the mythos of being wholly self-made is also a mythos, so it’s particularly appropriate when a fictional character represents it ;-)

    • #28
  29. raycon and lindacon Inactive
    raycon and lindacon
    @rayconandlindacon

    Of course we are at the end, because we have totally lost our beginning.

    “We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion… Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”  —  John Adams

    Without the knowledge of our Creator God, we are disconnected from Christian humility.  It is that humility, brought about by the connection with a Biblical understanding of the Christian God, which informed the founders, that made a democratic republic work.  It cannot be reconstituted sans-God, and have any expectation of success.

    It is the abandonment of that relationship with our Creator that has brought us to this end;

    “It can not be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  —  Patrick Henry

    There is no going back.  The God we no longer recognize has removed His Spirit, and His Blessing, from America.

    Repent!

    • #29
  30. Instugator Thatcher
    Instugator
    @Instugator

    Valiuth:

    David Knights:

    anonymous:

    I am personally optimistic that before 2050 we will understand the biological basis of intelligence, whatever it may be, and develop the tools to manipulate it. I don’t believe these tools will be restricted to the élite, but rather become available before long to everybody, just as every technology developed in the last century has. This will have the effect of increasing the mean intelligence of the population and perhaps narrowing the standard deviation.

    John, if you are correct, what happens next? If the population as a whole gets dramatically smarter, what do they do with that intelligence? Can you see any downsides of a radically smarter population? (Say a mean IQ of 140 as opposed to 100)

    Actually you could never have a mean IQ of 140 for the whole population. Because the Mean IQ by definition is set to 100. At least that is my understanding of how IQ works as a measurement.

    Not if you have an absolute grading scale with regard to the difficulty of the problems.

    The IQ tester designs a test and administers it to a sufficient quantity of people with a normally distributed range of cognitive abilities. He then calibrates the proper number of correct answers to a notional idea of IQ. The test is then given a date/time stamp  and is used for many years. With such a scale you could see if other factors (nutrition, etc) actually increase IQ across the population.

    So, yes you could and in practice do see changes in the mean over time.

    • #30
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