The whole idea of “IQ correlates with income, so we can eliminate poverty by genetically increasing people’s IQ” seems particularly stupid to me. Like, what do you think is the actual reason that IQ correlates with income? Is it because the magical money fairies give you more money the smarter you are? Also, IQ is a normed measure anyway, so the average is always 100 and there’s always the same number of people with each score… agh, it’s dumb for so many reasons
edit: wait, sorry, it’s actually stupider than I thought:
Elites play a disproportionate role in the economic productivity of nations because they occupy important roles in government and business. If one is interested in increasing economic output and creating better institutions, it would be wise to drastically improve the size and abilities of the elite… In an effort to empirically investigate this question, Carl and Kirkegaard (2022)investigated the benefit of the top 5% independent of the average national IQ level and found additional benefits beyond the benefit from the average IQ. This is fortunate, considering the most likely scenario is that elites adopt the technology more rapidly than the population at large. Government subsidies and low costs would ameliorate the issue of inequality.
Literally just trickle down IQnomics
I think in their minds, there is this magical threshold below which all the brown and disabled people live, and once you get rid of all the people residing below that threshold all you have left is smart people who want to make the world better.
And poorly at that. Intelligence is a mugs game, if you put your genetic points towards longevity you can keep your initial crowd of scientist/explorers as research leaders longer, which gives a bigger boost to research and more advantages.
At least until the robot god restarts the simulation and/or Paradox releases a new patch.
