The Making of a Dying Caste

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Inequality of innate ability is a fact of life. We see the inequality in athletics events such as the Olympics or the Tour de France. We also see the stratification in academic and professional achievement.

....our cognitive elites are increasingly inbred. Doctors used to marry nurses, professors used to marry their secretaries, business moguls used to marry starlets. Now doctors marry doctors, professors professors, moguls moguls, lawyers lawyers, etc. Those “modest origins” of our meritocratic elites are less modest by the year. We might be drifting towards a caste system, except that meritocracy requires some openness, some vacuuming-up of high-I.Q. outliers from the lower classes, some dumping of low-I.Q. duffers from the elites.

...The rich man is in his castle (actually, more likely, his gated community or doorman apartment complex) and the poor man is at his gate. They can’t really talk to each other because the poor man is almost certainly a couple of standard deviations below the rich man in I.Q. score. They don’t want to anyway, because they don’t much like each other....

I wish these … elites had a little more color and dash. I wish they were not so academic. I wish there were some sign of a Churchill among them, or a Roosevelt (Teddy for preference), or an Andy Jackson. I wish they had stronger opinions. I wish they showed more evidence of having courage. I wish, above all, that there were fewer of them. But do I have an alternative to meritocracy? Do I think these [elite college] kids are unspeakably awful, and will drag western civilization down to perdition? Would I prefer my own kids not have a shot at joining them, if they decide they want to? No, and no, and no.

Human society stumbles on forward, from imperfection to, one hopes, lesser imperfection. Our cognitive elites are not lovable. Every so often their arrogance and condescension will come breaking through the surface. It’s a pity there isn’t some way to forcibly mix them with their fellow citizens at some point in their cosseted young adulthood, so that they might at least have a shot at learning how to talk across the I.Q. gap; but in a free society, there is no way to do that. Absent that kind of social engineering, there is nothing for it but to lie back and let them rule us. They’ll probably make a pretty good job of it. They are, after all, the brightest and the best … however much we dislike them. _NR

IQ stratifies people in different occupations and professions. A caste comprising very high IQ individuals may be emerging. But as long as opportunity societies exist, high achieving and wealthy people will emerge frequently from the mid-level castes.

One of Derbyshire's glaring mistakes is in not analysing the birthrates of his new uber-elite. They are un-breeding themselves out of existence. Another mistake he makes is in neglecting the possiblity that genetic science will prove to be an "IQ equalizer", in the near future. At least in affluent countries. Sperm banks can certainly mix up the genetic combinations.

Derbyshire also neglects the phenomenon of psychological neoteny--the incompetence of a pampered adolescence that extends throughout a person's lifetime. An elite composed of neotenates is a particularly fragile elite. It cannot abide contradiction or challenge, and will not endure a close examination.