A single tax on intelligence?

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Andrew Sullivan writes,

What Freddie is arguing is that, far from treating genetic inequality as a taboo, the left should actually lean into it to argue for a more radical re-ordering of society. They shouldn’t ignore genetics, or treat it as unmentionable, or go into paroxysms of fear and alarm over “eugenics” whenever the subject comes up. They should accept that inequality is natural, and construct a politics radical enough to counter it.

For DeBoer, that means ending meritocracy — for “what could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled?” It means a revolutionary transformation in which there are no social or cultural rewards for higher intelligence, no higher after-tax income for the brainy, and in which education, with looser standards, is provided for everyone on demand — for the sake of nothing but itself. DeBoer believes the smart will do fine under any system, and don’t need to be incentivized — and their disproportionate gains in our increasingly knowledge-based economy can simply be redistributed to everyone else.

Henry George proposed a single tax on land, on the grounds (wink) that land is inelastically supplied. If you believe that intelligence is inherited, and you believe that intelligence is now the most important “factor of production,” then perhaps it follows that intelligence is like land.

The standard view on the left is to treat intelligence as if it were inelastically supplied at the top, so that we can tax the wealthy all we want. And also to treat it as if it were elastically supplied at the bottom, so that we can get more of it at the bottom by investing more in education and other programs.

Of course, there are other personality traits that are “factors of production” (conscientiousness, for example). But you could still focus on intelligence. You need to have a way to assess intelligence that cannot be gamed, just as for a single tax on land you would need a way to assess the value of land.

73 thoughts on “A single tax on intelligence?”

  1. My understanding of Georgism is that it was a tax on land, but not buildings. I would think the equivalent for people would be a head tax.

    • George wanted people to develop the land, and make it more valuable as well as make the nearby land more valuable. “Land valuation”, like property valuation, remains inexact, thus somewhat gameable. He was quite strong against the rich owning all the land, meaning much less for the poor.

      The head tax doesn’t have such a feature. Plus it’s extremely unpopular, partly because it seems unfair to the poor, altho it’s called fair by many Libertarians for treating all equally.

      The poor definitional differences between unfair, unequal, and unjust are part of our current problems.

    • Georgist taxes are a tax on the position of land. As Wm. F. Buckley said, it’s strange that a parking lot next to a skyscraper has its value raised by the existence of the skyscraper.

      The original formulation by Ricardo had a Physiocratic emphasis on agricultural production but that shifted when things went industrial.

  2. Thanks, Arnold. When I glanced at DeBoer’s book I laughed at the idea that the relevant concept of intelligence for understanding human behavior would be inherited (for the past 40 years, I have been struggling to update and expand Hayek’s last chapter to the last volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty).

    Let me retribute your reference with this one

    https://americanmind.org/essays/revolution-2020/#null

  3. We already have a tax on intelligence and the other personal factors of production: The progressive income tax.

    • +1

      However, am I the only that notices that the focus is always on the sacrifices and transfers that the upper end needs to make to the lower end? Does the lower end not owe anything in return? Nothing? E.g. Is it asking too much to potentially curtail reproduction?

    • Indeed.

      Reading the essay they are rather obvious about “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and then hand wave why this hasn’t worked in the past but will work in the future.

      Someone commented that we know what a lack of meritocracy looks like. It looks like some backward town in rural Italy where nobody deals fairly with anyone outside their clan. No pleasant.

      1) We want smart people to work hard

      2) We want them to work on useful things

      3) Meritocracy is the best way to make that happen

      4) The claim that “smart people will always do fine” is only true in the most banal sense. Smart people may well be best equipped to navigate terrifying circumstances, but we don’t want them using their smarts for that. Do we need all of our intellect being used on Politburu games.

      5) Finally, there is the problem of intergenerational and international supply of smarts, which is not fixed and also responds to incentives.

      They comment that all these doctors and lawyers seem exhausted in their 70 hour days, but perhaps if they could afford a good house in a good school district with less hours at the office they would have more kids. The best way for that to happen is less parasites around.

      • Somehow I don’t think that more immigration from China would lead to shorter workweeks for white collar professionals, though it would likely lead to lower proportion of people using government benefits.

      • Meritocracy is the right goal.

        But genetic merit, in talents etc, is not equal. It’s not fair.
        There is no cosmic justice available to make it equal (and fair!).

        But what society should do, is give more to those who work harder, try smarter (avoiding pregnancy and crime, especially), in some reasonable / politically acceptable balance.

        We give handicapped folk nearer parking spots, by law, to stores. No amount of help transforms the handicapped into the unhandicapped.

  4. “You need to have a way to assess intelligence that cannot be gamed”
    All though SAT prep classes would need to be revised. The new classes would teach people to look stupid without actually being stupid. I foresee an endless arms race.

  5. This proposal seems to be a year early for the 60th anniversary of the publication of Harrison Bergeron.

  6. > the smart will do fine under any system

    We have a couple of continents that show that’s certainly not true. Unless there really aren’t many smart people in most parts of Africa, South America, SE Asia, … .

  7. Steve Sailer likes to joke that the only way to reliably narrow racial gaps in IQ and educational achievement may be to “hit Asian and white kids on the head with a ballpeen hammer.”

    Before he deleted his Twitter account years ago, Freddie DeBoer wrote that he would hypothetically support artificially lowering the IQ of high-IQ groups if that was the only way achieve equality.

    It’s a bit surprising that someone turns out to be so malevolent and unhinged that he endorses something like Sailer’s thought experiment, and then still gets respectful attention from blue-checks.

    • “Freddie DeBoer wrote that he would hypothetically support artificially lowering the IQ of high-IQ groups if that was the only way achieve equality.”

      If that is true then DeBoer isn’t only malevolent and sadistic, he is a moron. A US passport still means something at the moment. The obvious solution is to import more African doctors, scientists, and engineers. The IQs of “disadvantaged minorities” will go up, there will be more “people who look like me” in places of authority, and the argument could be made that there would be less “systemic racism”. Plus, non-black people would win by have greater access to quality professionals. Leftists would be happy as the new immigrants would be net tax contributors. We can just sweep under the rug that it won’t actually do much to help the problems of the inner-cities as appearance trumps substance in these matters.

      • There aren’t enough smart Africans.

        Even if Africans all had the same IQ as African Americans (unlikely) the % above 130 would be 0.13%. At a billion africans that is 1.3 million of them for the entire world, a complete drop in the bucket compared to the overall 130+ IQ global population.

        If African IQ is closer to say 80 as opposed to 85 (because no 20% white DNA) then the numbers are even more dismal. 130+ IQ is cut by 70% or so. And keep in mind African IQ isn’t even 80, that’s just a best case estimate of what it might be if you could solve all the problems in Africa and reach maximum potential.

        A group with a 100 average IQ, and there are many with far higher, will still outstrip them 17.5 to 1 per capita in the 130+ IQ cohort (57 to 1 at 80 IQ).

        • It couldn’t be done in a year or even a decade, but it could be done over time. I cannot attest to the quality of your numbers, but, assuming an 80 average IQ for Africa, you are assuming a perfect bell curve with no fat tails. I would be very skeptical of this. The African elite get education, prenatal care, and health outcomes similar to US children. I would be willing to bet that their IQs would be very close, if not higher, than the USA 118 average. Certainly, the current group of immigrants is doing very well. Happily, that contingent is steadily growing in Africa.
          Let’s not forget, this is pretty much what happens with Asian Americans. The immigrants that we receive are not representative of the average Asian. They are outliers that have won their immigration through their brilliance and possession of skills in deemed in need.

        • You don’t need 130+ IQs for this to work. Rather, 110+ IQs would be good enough (to account for regression towards the mean). If 2% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s total population has an IQ potential of 110+, and Sub-Saharan Africa’s population will be 4 billion in 2100, then there will be a whopping 80 million Sub-Saharan Africans who would qualify for this. You could even go a little lower if you really needed to. For instance, IQs of 108+ or even 105+. That should give you at least several dozen million additional Sub-Saharan Africans to work with on top of these 80 million.

      • You could have whites and Asians play dumb, but then Western civilization would collapse. Is that really an acceptable price worth paying for closing racial and ethnic average IQ gaps? I, for one, certainly don’t think so!

    • I love how the left always takes very reasonable arguments in favor of redistribution and then converts them into revanchism. It’s as if the bitterness revenge and retribution, however unfounded, are more important than the policies themselves.

      • The envy and hatred against those more successful is far more emotionally intense than the desire to help the poor. Especially when so many poor make so many poor decisions.

        Because they’re not too smart. With or, more often, without high or avg. IQ scores.

        Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge genocide against educated (unfairly smart ?) Cambodians was mostly fueled by such bitter envy.

    • Is there a link to a screencap of this tweet? If true this is one of the worst (both morally and stupidity-wise) ideas I think I’ve ever heard of from a mainstream writer/pundit. How is it that in a world where it’s socially unacceptable to be Charles Murray, this is considered acceptable? If this guy shouldn’t be cancelled, pretty much no one should be.

      • I was too stupid to think of screencapping it back then. Probably the best (maybe only) way to confirm is to ask DeBoer directly.

  8. Robert Reich proposed in the WSJ, many years ago, “super-school-vouchers” that set different amounts for different children, based on their need.

    He disavowed it shortly thereafter, when he ran for Gov in Massachusetts, and later built a new narrative to disavow it even more, when he went to Cal.

    • If we treated school like an “investment”, its obvious we should spend more, not less, per pupil on the more gifted. The ROI advantages are obvious. Instead we do the opposite.

      I suppose an egalitarian compromise is equal-ish but affordable spending on everyone but tracking for the most gifted and extra resources as they get older. Seems we can’t maintain that hypocritically for long though, someone calls you out for not having enough faith.

      • I don’t think that it is as straightforward as spending more or less. It seems that the really scarce resources in k-12 education in the US are good teachers and well behaved students. My impression is that teachers compete vigorously to get jobs at schools with well behaved students, and parents compete vigorously to get their kids into those schools, usually through buying expensive real estate in a “good school district”. Given that IQ, conscientious, extroversion, agreeableness, looks and height are all heritable to some extent, making good schools expensive to attend does do a great deal of filtering the scarce resources to the more gifted subset of US children, though of course it disadvantages otherwise gifted children whose family does not have the money to get them into a good school.

        • It’s primary detriment is that parents have to get into a Red Queen Race for “good schools” by bidding up scarce real estate. An incredible waste of time and resources.

          It’s not even clear to me that more real estate building would solve the problem, because prices being high enough to keep out the riff raff is the entire point.

          The only real solution is academic tracking (to ensure classrooms are full of people that can keep up with the curriculum) and adequate school discipline so the bad don’t drag down the good. Probably need to expel the bottom 10% or so too, with that being a lot more than 10% in some demographics. Then maybe the above average and below average could share a school building together.

          “Good public schools” are worth about $300k to a family of four, meaning that it dominates all aspects our real estate market and is the largest budget item for most people.

  9. Freddie, sometimes, is a whale of a thinker. But in some others (such as this domain) he is dangerously off-kilter.

  10. The creation of incentives to do poorly on IQ tests- what could possibly go wrong? I’ve always wondered how much of the Flynn Effect was the result of children of farmers deliberately doing poorly on IQ tests in order to be exempt from compulsory education so they could continue working on farms. (Flynn Effect- rising population level IQ scores over time. Compulsory High School education, mostly 1880’s or so in Europe, roughly 1920’s in USA.)

  11. Even (actually, especially) if one believes economic incentives don’t matter at all, social incentives matter a great deal, and deBoer also believes intelligence (and presumably high IQ professions) should confer no status advantage either. There’s an argument that many people will be doctors and scientists without high salaries, but that’s because of the high status. One has to be delusional to believe most smart people who do useful things do those things primarily because they’re altruists. They do them more because they want everyone else to praise them for how altruistic they are.

    A starting moral premise of his writing seems to be that literally the only measure that matters is equality, and well-being should be completely ignored. He’d rather we all die at 4o in straw huts. For that reason nothing he says can ever be remotely convincing to those of us who care about well-being (especially if much more than equality).

    • FWIW, I certainly wouldn’t rule out the possibility of some financial incentives actually working in regards to professions where you need a high IQ to be successful but which can also be extremely stressful: For instance, being a surgeon. If you had a high-IQ and your choice was between being a surgeon or being office plankton but with comparable salaries (not to mention comparable social prestige!), then you might decide “Why bother dealing with all of the extra stresses of being a surgeon if I’m not going to get paid (significantly) more for this?” Seriously. It’s certainly a rational calculation.

  12. For me, intelligence is a curse as well as a blessing — and it has as much salience to my own sense of moral worth as my blood-type. In many ways, I revere those with less of it, whose different skills — practical, human, imaginative — make the world every day a tangibly better place for others, where mine do not. Being smart doesn’t make you happy; it can inhibit your sociability; it can cut you off from others; it can generate a lifetime of insecurity; it is correlated with mood disorders and anxiety.

    +1

    • I agree – there seems to be an IQ fetish in the comments of this blog (HT @asdf). Not too surprising given the demographics of the readers.

      However, I’ve never met anyone in my life with high intelligence that considered it a curse or a trade-off. By the same token, I’ve never met anyone with freakishly good basketball skills that came to regret them.

      And, I highly doubt that the trade-offs implied (e.g. intelligence vs. sociability) are nearly as clear cut as he implies. The correlation might actually run in the opposite direction (e.g. intelligence and sociability go hand in hand).

      • Biology is a series of trade-offs, like designing a car. Consider, for example, that Ashkenazi Jews have the highest average IQ of any ethnic group, and not only do they (we) suffer from some pretty serious genetic diseases like Tay Sachs, Gaucher’s Disease, etc, that basically nobody else gets, but we also have a well-deserved reputation for neuroticism. Note just how many NBA All Stars vs Nobel Laureates this group has produced over the past, say, 50 years. It’s not a particularly even split, and this is not a coincidence.

        • Is that neuroticism really a result of the intelligence, or of a millennia of violent persecution? From anecdotal observation, it seems to me that Mormons have above average IQ without having the neuroticism.

          • Mormons are slightly more educated than US adults overall, and about as educated or the ever bit slightest behind most historically white mainline protestant denominations (presbyterians, lutherans, etc).

            They are nowhere near Jewish levels.

        • Please re-read the quote to which you gave a +1.

          Your analysis here, while true, is completely missing the point of the quote.

          Super duper desirable trait A
          Desirable trait B
          Desirable trait C
          Etc.

          The author is stating two things, both of which appear false to me:

          1) people high in super duper desirable trait A should want to sacrifice some of it for desirable traits B, C, etc.

          2) trait A is negatively correlated with the other desirable traits.

          Wilt Chamberlain was freakishly tall with a freakishly long wingspan. He seemed quite happy with the result and reaped enormous benefits (including many many mating opportunities). In addition, he seemed like a perfectly sociable and good person.

          • I would reverse the two and say this:

            1. Trait A is desirable, but being really strong in Trait A is correlated with negative outcomes along some other dimension(s). This happens all the time. To use your example, sure, Wilt Chamberlain’s combination of size and speed served him well on the basketball court, but really tall people are more likely to have heart issues and back problems. Chamberlain died of heart failure at age 63, seven years after first being hospitalized with heart issues. Coincidence? Probably not.

            2. People super high in desirable trait A might wish they could trade some of that trait when they experience negative outcomes that are correlated with trait A. If you were one of those really tall people, who say, developed chronic back or heart issues in middle age, there’s no way you wouldn’t be happy to give up an inch or two in height in order to be healthier, especially if you did not enjoy Chamberlain’s level of success.

          • Sure, but this meets the problem of tournaments. If Wilt Chamberlain were slightly less athletic, his reward might be zero instead of fame.

            Similarly, even having slightly less IQ is the difference between being able to advance civilization and not.

            In an agricultural malthusian environment the jews might trade their IQ for something else. I don’t think the Jews are willing to trade it for something else today.

      • It may be nearly impossible for a person to really assess whether they’d rather be smart or not. It’s like asking a man if he’d rather be a woman, or vice versa. One’s desires are conditional on what one already is. A smart person will tend to value intelligence and disdain dumbness, but he’d have to somehow set that aside to assess whether he’d be happier dumb. I think it may be one of those traits for which it’s difficult to conceptually step back behind the veil ignorance.

        There are likely some advantages to a middling IQ: there are more people who are similar to you and have similar interests. I think high IQ males often have exceptional difficulty with dating because there are far fewer females with unusually high IQs. But again, a given intelligent person probably doesn’t want to befriend or date average IQ people; rather maybe he wishes he did want to. Tradeoffs are harder to assess though for higher order desires is what I’m getting at I guess.

        • Do we want to live in a society where people would, if they could take an objectively correct view of things, have less IQ? If we lived in such a society, would we not end up with lower IQ over time? Is a lower IQ society a better society, even for the low IQ? Third World indicates no…

          • Wanting to live in a society with lots of people with high IQs doesn’t necessarily entail wanting to have a high IQ. Even if life is more pleasant being mediocre we all have good reasons for wanting others to be smart so they can do useful things for us.

  14. I’m a long time reader who has never posted a comment on this (or any other) blog.  Over the years, I’ve enjoyed many items I’ve read, both here and abroad surfing the web, but this one really tops them all.

    If there is a tax on intelligence it seems tautological that the truly intelligent will figure a way to look sufficiently stupid to avoid paying the tax.  Thus, only unintelligent people will, in the end, be forced to pay.   Fantastic: a tax on intelligence that only hammers the dumb ones.  I love it.

    I’m not an economist (only an old, very old, country topologist) but this seems to me to illuminate the fundamental unforeseen consequences shared by all tax policies I’ve been subjected to or read about. 

  15. The OP asks a simple question. Is it inelastic? It’s not so much about taxing “unearned” things as “inelastic” things. Unimproved land is land, they aren’t making any more or less of it. Intelligence can go up or down, be used or unused, and improve the world or be used for other purposes.

    Lastly, intelligence is “earned”, in a sense, if not by the current generation. If we take Gregory Clarks argument seriously, intelligence is the result of generation after generation of yeomen farmers and shopkeepers struggling against malthusian conditions to bring more children into the world and help them survive into adulthood. If that isn’t earned, what is?

    • “Lastly, intelligence is ‘earned’, in a sense, if not by the current generation.”

      I know biological siblings with vastly different IQs. Did one “earn” his high IQ while the other “earned” his lower IQ?

      Seems kinda ludicrous to imply this…you’re going to have to do some serious stretching of the definition of earned to get there.

      Lastly, I didn’t really find Gregory Clark’s normative argument to be particularly compelling, at least the one he presented in “The Son Also Rises.”

      • “Did one “earn” his high IQ while the other “earned” his lower IQ?”

        The *parent* “earned” the average IQ of his offspring, in a statistical expected value sense.

        “I didn’t really find Gregory Clark’s normative argument to be particularly compelling”

        You’ll have to spell out what you felt that argument was and why you found it no compelling.

        • Yeah, like I said, you’re going to have to do a lot of verbal gymnastics to get there. So far, you haven’t disappointed me.

          E.g. for those born with Trisomy 21 (aka Down’s syndrome), did they “earn” their biological outcome?

          • You keep missing it.

            Kids can’t “earn” their genes.

            Parents “earn” the genes of thier kids.

            There is a reason that men are attracted to younger rather than older women. The eggs of the young are superior to the eggs of the old. Downs syndrome is one of those reasons. Superior men will breed with younger women less likely to produce downs syndrome offspring.

            The inferior children will die young, and the superior children will populate the next generation.

            What Gregory Clark proved is that market oriented traits (the kind that heat our homes and put food on our table) can be selected for through this process, rather than say marshal prowess (like the Mongols).

  16. “DeBoer believes the smart will do fine under any system, and don’t need to be incentivized — and their disproportionate gains in our increasingly knowledge-based economy can simply be redistributed to everyone else.”

    Wrong. Completely wrong.

    You tax something and you get less of it. You subsidize something and you get more of it.

    Case in point, Californi which follows the DeBoer model with high taxes on high intelligence high earners and generous welfare benefits. What does that produce? The lowest average IQ state in the USA, the lowest educational attainment of any state, the most poverty, and the worst state government.

    And, of course, there are millions of people of a wide range of IQ whose goals and ambitions are thwarted by a host of state imposed obstacles to upward mobility.

    Radical redistribution won’t ennoble or improve. Opportunity will..

    Frank H. Buckley gets it correct with his politics of mobility:

    “Suppose we embraced a politics of mobility. What would that look like? For the most part, it’s not rocket science. Simply undo the mobility-destroying laws that like a python have wrapped themselves around our economy and fed upon it. Of course, that’s going to be harder in the U.S. than in other First World countries, which mostly have parliamentary forms of government. In our presidential system, with its separation of powers, we lack the reversibility of parliamentary government, where it’s easier to undo bad laws. Here there’s a one-way ratchet in which bad laws are enacted and then are turned into the laws of the Medes and the Persians. That goes a fair way toward explaining our problems with mobility.

    But let’s suppose we could get over that. Apart from a negative agenda of undoing the impediments the left has erected—the bad schools, the absurd immigration laws—would we have a positive agenda? Lincoln had one, and he was the father of the American Dream. At the core of his vision for America was the idea that one’s lot in life should not be fixed, that everyone should be permitted to ascend from the lowest stations, as he himself had done in rising from the grinding and desperate poverty of a hardscrabble farm. Through his own efforts, he had bettered himself, read voraciously, and become a lawyer; and from his personal rise he took an understanding of society that led in time to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery, as expressed in his July 4, 1861, “Address to Congress.” This was how, he told Congress, the fight to preserve the Union should be seen.

    This is essentially a people’s contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men; to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

    https://isi.org/modern-age/for-a-politics-of-mobility/

  17. If there is one thing that is true, elites will rise in any society (cf. Greg Clark, The Son Also Rises), BUT how they channel their talents will be determined by society and its incentives. Europe has a large share of the world’s cognitive elites, but the socialistic turn they and their universities took from the 1960s on made them far less innovative than the Europeans of the 1920s and 1930s.

    The USSR had elites who focused on rocket science, chess, ballet, etc. But they weren’t nearly as good as capitalists in producing industries that could innovate, grow, and overproduce high quality consumer goods for the nation. A tax like Sullivan describes would devastate the little bit of innovative productive capacity the US has left.

  19. DeBoer plays the Alan Colmes part to Sullivan’s Hannity. The straw man. Nobody writes about him seriously except Sullivan. Hes a sad joke on the left.

  20. “Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough” So wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, “for the protection and health of the state” did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court has never expressly overturned the decision.

    Carrie Buck was a patient in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded. Upon a finding that she was “the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, he Court upheld her involuntary tubal ligation.

    Justice Holmes wrote the opinion for the court:

    “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

    I’d like to see how Justice Holmes would fare in a Senate Judiciary Confirmation hearing today. If the pendulum was ever to swing back to Justice Holmes point of view, in the future, in order to be permitted to have offspring, your genome may have to meet certain minimum standards.

    • I shared those links because they seemed relevant. Readers of this fabulous blog can draw their own conclusions.

      A couple other things I’ll post here impulsively, driven by my intuition.

      1. Society needs a mix of people. I believe Prof. Kling suggested that somewhere. I recall the phrase “including some disagreeables.”

      In the chicken farming analogy, the unit of analysis is the level of productivity of the entire laying “clutch.” You can’t just round up all the individual high layers and put them in a laying barn and have things work out. Look at the whole clutch. (I cannot source this claim.)

      2. I think a lot of our intellectual talent is misdirected. The optimal arrangement is not clear to me–it’s perhaps not discernible a priori.

      Somewhere Robert Conquest quoted somebody else along the lines that for more than 100 years Latin America had been troubled by the existence of about 3x more educated (literary?) intellectuals than it really needed or was optimal. The oversupply tended to promote dissension, instability, hare-brained schemes. Conquest then suggested that the Anglosphere had avoided that problem for most of its history, but it had now emerged here as well.

      Getting back to deBoer, whose writings I have sometimes enjoyed, he’s probably a good example of what Bruce Charlton would call a “clever silly.” I think he has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is common among creative thinkers. We can guess that he has lots of ideas, many of which are not to be implemented. I think of the quip about Churchill–his colleagues thought “Winston has 100 ideas every day,” at most 4 were good and many were dangerous.

      Charlton link here:

      http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/11/clever-sillies-why-high-iq-lack-common.html

      As Charlton points out, it takes one to know one.

      In a subsequent essay Charlton discusses the ideal self-transformation of clever sillies into “clever crazies.”

      Charlton also has written about the “genius famine.”

      Perhaps we have unappreciated geniuses whose gifts are under-utilized. Meanwhile, here we are discussing a hare-brained tax on intelligence!

  22. “If the pendulum was ever to swing back to Justice Holmes point of view, in the future, in order to be permitted to have offspring, your genome may have to meet certain minimum standards.”

    Nah…just provide massive financial subsidies to the lower end for forgoing reproduction. And, access to free, safe and convenient abortion services and contraceptives.

  23. The Georgist tax on Land Value remains a good idea. Land is inelastic AND the more some rich folk of land, the less land there is for others. Plus there’s plenty of low cost land available in the USA, and most countries.

    What makes land valuable is … location! (location! location!) — and other people nearby. The good schools and other benefits of being around good people. I’d support a 1% tax on residential real estate, not just land value, over some limit. Like 10* last year’s median gross pay (~$63k?), so about $630,000 and over. (Collect avg $ cost/sq foot for houses in each school district. Use that as the “estimated” value for annual taxes, with adjusted value upon next sale. Only small gaming available.)

    The “good people” are almost always “intelligent”, having good neighbors is what makes a good neighborhood. They follow the 4 good policies for success of:
    1. Graduating from high school,
    2. Getting and keeping a job for over a year,
    3. Avoiding having babies until being married, and
    4. Avoiding a criminal record, thru not committing crimes.

    Forrest Gump, IQ 76, was able to follow these policies. There are virtually no “poor people” in America who followed these not-too-difficult, not-too big-brain needing policies.

    IQ might be clear, but “intelligence” is not so much; SAT scores are good predicting school success.

    I’d be in favor of taxing college graduates of 1% of their wages above the median, as a near surrogate for taxing “intelligence”, tho it’s also a tax on credentialism, which I oppose. More could then do like Bill Gates and drop out to avoid getting their degree and paying that tax (he got honory degree in 2007) — I already favor more folk doing that.
    {Now for some comments on comments}

  24. Bluntly., treating intelligence as a rents-bearing thing would be massively illiberal. It also completely ignores the large levels of consumer surplus from improvements to production, logistics and communications that flow from intelligence.

    The proving that leftism is for people who are bad at math continues apace. It’s not like there’s no history of people who held roughly “Levellers” opinions written about.

  25. There is no “cult of smart”.

    It’s just a long-winded and invalid “life is unfair” argument for more redistribution.

    It’s just so easy to envy and resent the gifted who are born better able to leverage their talents and combine them with effort to get more of the nice things we want too, and thus to get other people to agree that we are all entitled to simply grab their stuff.

    All we have to do is pretend that it’s more fair for us to have it instead of them, even if they earned it fair and square, and we didn’t. All that needs is some narrative explaining that their gains are – when you really think about it – ill-gotten.

    Now, there *is* a “cult of the blank slate” (Null-hypothesis-rejectionism”), and a “cult of Kendism” (mouthful version: “the statistical indistinguishability of cognitive potential for all human subgroups”). Freddie rejects the former, though he says he’s a proud member of the latter cult. Sullivan used to reject the latter cult, but now says he’s “””agnostic””” about it, because he has to say that. Everyone just has to lie all the time.

    But no one is actually mistaken or deluded about the fact that it is in fact better to be smarter, in lots of ways, including one’s ability to solve hard problems, to come up with new ideas, to remember lots of thing, and to create more marketable value. It’s also better to be more handsome or athletic. People want to be better at all kinds of things, and they want that for their mates and children too. They are right and rational to want those things, therefore, no ‘cult’.

    Look I like Freddie and have been following his writing for, boy, what is it now, 15 years? Even before his lhote blog. He used to be much more “leftist-libertarian” (before that set of Orange Line Libertarians went more progressive) and a follower of the same old names of that scene: Will Wilkinson, Conor Friedersdorf, Megan McArdle, etc. Sullivan has been covering his writing for a long time too.

    Freddie seems to have moved more hard-old-left, while everyone else moved more woke-left, and went way past him, as he’s always seemed to be constitutionally incapable of just group-thinking his way into their good graces and swallow the dumbest, most incoherent lines from the new SJW woke-left. His common sensical rejection of those lines gets him into constant, undeserved trouble he doesn’t need. I think this is yet more evidence that good contrarians are “extremely high functioning” people with some kind of insuperable psychological defect where normal people put their instincts for conformity and agreeableness.

    I bought his book, and he’s having a hard time lately, so I highly encourage all of you to throw him a few bones and buy a copy too. It’s probably the best way to help him as it tells publishers that they can make money by giving him work.

    But it’s charity if you do so. There isn’t actually anything in it worth serious consideration. The book, and even Sullivan’s review, are unfortunately just two more examples of the intellectual collapse of progressive argumentation due to our public discourse being conducted in the shadow of a Guillotine. C’est la vie.

    • There’s absolutely a “cult of smart”. More than a cult, the the de facto state religion is faith in higher education (and increasingly, even higher education in the form of grad school).

      Everyone knows that the smart people go to college and get smarter by learning from the super smart people there. The excesses and control over the rest of society exercised by the religion approach that of the medieval Catholic church, and anyone who doubts the wisdom of the system is a heretic.

      The true believers pour their life’s savings into donations to the church before they’ve even started living, and then spend their lives paying it back. Why? Because they’re buying acceptance as one of the “smart people”, and to willingly disdain that path is anathema.

      • You are talking about what I called the cult of null-hypothesis-rejectionism.

        So, let me clarify. Let’s try to make a rhetorically reasonable and non-abusive definition for complaining about there being a “cult of X”.

        We all know that ‘cult’ is supposed to be an epithet: a term of disparagement and denigration.

        It is meant to refer to seemingly brainwashed people who are doing irrational and counterproductive things and acting like dogmatic and fanatical zealots hewing to set a set of false and dangerous beliefs.

        The cult is a phenomenon of social psychology and maintained by the typical pressures and mechanisms, especially coordination around focal elites and isolation from opposing viewpoints. By calling something a cult, you are saying that these people won’t independently examine their wrong beliefs, and stubbornly resist any attempts at correction, even though it is clear from the outside view that they are harming their own interests in the process.

        Now, if X is true – a set of ideas that is a tolerably accurate reflection of factual reality – it’s not rhetorically reasonable to call people acting consisting with it as belonging to a ‘cult’.

        On the other hand, if X deviates importantly from reality and causes all kinds of avoidable harm, then we’ve got a good candidate.

        But note, just like “Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if prosper, none dare call it treason,” if the cult is *in charge* as the dominant orthodoxy and reigning state religion – that is, in a position to intimidate people by persecuting heretics – then none dare call it a cult. So a lot of people who don’t have any sincere belief in the cult will nevertheless have no choice but to pay lip service, go through the motions, check all the boxes, and jump through whatever hoops are required to get by in life.

        Like “price-takers” without a strong negotiating position or market power (as in, “take it or leave it”), they are also “system-takers”, without any social power to take on the cult. You either get with the program, or you get locked out of it. System-takers may look like they’re part of the cult, but to they extent they seem to support it, they are just subject to it, not part of it.

        Now, in reality, it is really important and useful to be smart. Not just individually, it’s important for everybody, even though who aren’t very gifted, to have a society with a good fraction of smart people (see Jones’ “Hive Mind”). That is not some arbitrary and socially constructed convention, and it’s not cultish to believe it, or to believe people at elite levels of productivity and performance deserve the gains their fellow men hand them in voluntary exchanges.

        Compare that to, say, Usain Bolt winning the olympic gold medal in the sprint, or Michael Phelps for swimming. If society hadn’t created these particular show tournaments where particular athletic abilities were emphasized, it would hardly matter at all to one’s productivity, survival, usefulness, or life outcomes being able to sprint or swim that fast. We don’t care about absolute levels, only who is best. If the top million sprinters in the world suddenly vanished, it wouldn’t make much difference to anything. That’s not true at all for the top million smart people; if the world lost all its real geniuses it would be a disaster. Absolute levels matter.

        Also, let’s say for the sake of argument that any higher education is *not* a net waste of time and money for, say those at least one standard deviation above the mean: IQ 115+, the top 16%. From personal experience I would say that’s a pretty reasonable and accurate cut-off not necessarily for “college material” as for “likely to benefit, on net” from the experience. That may sound ‘elitist’, but the “one out of six” is just not that bad. To make a living playing any sport is more like top 0.01% level talent.

        All that isn’t part of the “cult” – it’s just facts. The cult stuff is all the additional deviations from that. The cult of college-for-everyone-ism (see the lumina foundation), the cult of blank-slateism, the cult of null-hypothesis-rejectionism, the cult of close-the-gap-ism, the cult of Kendism.

        We have a name for the cult of all those things, which is the “Cult of Progressivism” or the “Cult of Woke”.

        • I don’t think we’re disagreeing much on substance but I’m still not signing on to the terminology. Mine is better because it’s simpler and clearer and more generally understandable and applicable. Principally:

          1. It doesn’t really matter if X is true or not. Certainly it’s better to be smart, but this is wholly separate from whether people who are do irrational and counterproductive things and act like dogmatic and fanatical zealots hewing to set a set of false and dangerous beliefs.

          It’s good to be smart, but people have a lot of dogma and irrational beliefs surrounding intelligence. This is clearly cultish even if it’s true and even if the dogma more or less “works” for x% of the population.

          2 Regarding the latter point, I think it’s evident that while it can be said to “work” at some level for society, it’s vastly more costly and irrational than many other alternatives. There’s a massive deadweight loss associated with the dogma.

          3. As a final point, I might concede to a “cult of education” rather than a cult of “intelligence”, though I think we all know the former is mostly a means of signaling the latter. It’s still a cult because there’s dogma associated with it despite there also being some factual truths. And, crucially, it’s pretty hard to look at any of the other “cults” you posit and see them as more than subsets of the cult of smarts. For one, the cult of education is largely excepted by those who don’t accept the others, and largely predates them.

          • Right, “Cult of Education” is a good way to put it. But if one wanted to take that cult on rigorously, comprehensively, and devastatingly, one would write a book called, “The Case Against Education”, which Bryan Caplan already did and is one of his great achievements. I don’t think Freddie adds anything to that case, and to extent his book deviates from it, it’s not worth taking seriously.

  26. “I bought his book, and he’s having a hard time lately, so I highly encourage all of you to throw him a few bones and buy a copy too. It’s probably the best way to help him as it tells publishers that they can make money by giving him work.”

    No thanks!

    He literally just published a book, which is something that 99.9% of the population will never experience. I’m supposed to feel sorry for that? Seriously?

    Also, I support meritocracy and buying this book for charity purposes is sending the wrong signal for multiple reasons.

    Lastly, the book is available at no charge from the usual internet sources. If you feel so inclined, just send him a direct welfare payment as opposed to funneling the proceeds through the publisher. Much more efficient that way.

  27. Incidentally, is there any reason it is impossible for intelligence to be inelastic at the top and elastic at the bottom? Clearly the “bottom” level of intelligence has risen over centuries, and it’s not clear the top has.

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