Patri Friedman

TBC's "central concern was that meritocratic elevation of the brightest out of various social strata..might exert a dyscultural effect..a society run by its cognitive elites would make life difficult for those on the wrong end of the IQ bell curve."

"meritocracy may be driving us towards a society that is not just economically but genetically stratified." (I have long pointed out the paradox that maximizing equality of opportunity creates a world 100% stratified by ability, ~50% genetic)

An ability-sorted world will have a strong and rigid class structure where genetically gifted families accumulate massive wealth. If that sounds bad, should you really be trying to remove non-genetic factors of success variance like opportunity, birth country, etc?

Back to @esrtweet "At the beginning of the Flat Century...the genetic potential for upward mobility was more widely distributed in lower SESes because it had not yet been selected out by the uplifters...But now it’s 2018."

"Even as American society as a whole is getting steadily richer, more peaceful and less crime-ridden, its lowest SES tiers are going to hell in a handbasket..The prophecies of TBC [are] coming hideously true."

"We have assorted ourselves into increasing cognitive inequality by class. and the poor are paying..Furthermore, the natural outcome of the process is average IQ and other class differentiating abilities abilities..becoming genetically locked in."

"I fear that with the reappearance of a servant class the wonderful egalitarianism of the America we have known will fade, to be replaced by a much more hierarchical and status-bound order...This prospect disgusts me; I’m a child of the Flat Century, a libertarian."

"There is only one way out of this..We’ll need to figure out how to fight the economic and genetic drift towards an ability-stratified society by intervening at the root causes. Drugs to make people smarter; germ-line manipulation to make their kids brighter."