tclancyHarold and George Destroy the World
The effects of Idiocracy are much worse than we appreciate. I believe it's hidden in part by technology (as a cognitive crutch) and part by top skilled immigration (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries). And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization and catering to the lowest common denominator. Student A is bad at math and good at language, student B is the opposite, both get the worst education for both subjects.
I think we haven't felt yet the true consequences of this. Worldwide.
Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists. Is “stupid people breed too much” really an issue we think is worth propagating?
There can be also a softer version of it, which is that cultural richness and focus on education are easily transmitted within families. A society that doesn't value culture and education is going to produce less educated families with even less educated children.
It’s also true that IQ is both real and highly heritable. The military uses what’s essentially an IQ test to screen out the bottom 15% or so of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801.... The military has found that people with aptitude test scores below the cutoff can’t be trained to competently perform any job in the military.
IQ is also highly heritable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927.
IQ correlates most strongly with socioeconomic class, with members of the same ethnic group scoring higher over the decades as that ethnic group as a whole becomes wealthier.
Exactly the opposite is true. Adoption studies have been used to isolate the effect of SES itself, and the contribution of that factor is low: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (“Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01… Heritability was estimated to be 0.42.”).
This is just SIBS data. It has all the standard "Minnesota" limitations: the study is tiny, the cohort isn't demographically representative, adoption isn't itself random, nothing deconfounds the prenatal environment, and the children in the cohort are also adopted at different ages.
It's one thing to call out an interesting paper; it's another to act as if the matter has been settled simply by pointing to SIBS.