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5.24
General Social Trend #1:
 
  The shift of intelligence by geography  
  One hundred years ago, within social frameworks by geography people of higher than average intellect lived, worked and played in communities alongside people of average or lower than average intellect. Before the explosion of 20th century mega cities, the evidence of localised intelligence was everywhere, from the owners of central stores, to the doctors and specialists that existed side by side with their patients, customers and supporters.  
  However, since the development of large urban landscapes, this distribution of intelligence has changed dramatically. We now see the development of intellectual ghettos, of upper middle class and middle class “fortress” neighbourhoods populated by educated people with degrees.  
  At the other end of the spectrum, those with higher than average cognitive abilities continue to be plucked out of poorer areas to be schooled, developed and sometimes redistributed into the intelligent ghettos. Not since the earliest days of societies have we seen such a deliberate delineation of resources and policies to the detriment of those that have less.  
  Rather than reducing such trends, governments of developed and developing economies have actively promoted such stripping of general and higher intelligence from communities into “smart ghettos” and “dumb ghettos”.  
5.24.1 The invisible migration  
  As we described, the cognitive elite refers to people in the top percentiles of cognitive ability who, over the course of the 20th century, have been part of a vast but nearly invisible migration.  
  At the beginning of the century, the great majority of people in the top 5 to 10 percent of the intellectual distribution were not college educated, often not even high school educated and they lived their lives scattered almost indistinguishably among the rest of the population. Their interests were just as variegated. Many were small business people or farmers, sharing the political outlook of those groups. Many worked on assembly lines or as skilled craftsmen. The top of the cognitive ability distribution probably included leaders of the labour movement and of community organisations.  
  Among the smart women, a few had professional careers of their own, but most of them kept house, reared children and were often the organising forces of their religious and social communities.  
  People from the top of the cognitive ability distribution lived next door to people who were not so smart, with whose children their own children went to school. They socialised with, went to church with, and married people less bright than themselves as a matter of course. This was not an egalitarian utopia that we are trying to recall. On the contrary, communities were stratified by wealth, religions, class, ethnic background and race. The stratifications may have been stark, even bitter, but people were not stratified by cognitive ability.  
  As the century progressed, the historical mix of intellectual abilities at all levels of society thinned as intelligence rose to the top. The upper end of the cognitive ability distribution has been increasingly channelled into higher education, especially the top colleges and professional schools, thence into hight- IQ occupations and senior managerial positions. The upshot us that the scattered brightest of the early 20th century have congregated, forming a new class.  
  Membership of this new class, the cognitive elite, is gained by high IQ: neither social background, nor ethnicity, nor lack of money will bar the way. But once in the club, usually by age eighteen, members begin to share much more as well. Among other things, they will come to run much of the country's business. In the private sector, the cognitive elite dominates the ranks of CEO's and the top echelon of corporate executives Smart people have no doubt always had the advantage in commerce and industry, but their advantage has grown as the barriers against the "wrong" nationalities, ethnicities, religions or socioeconomic origins have been dismantled. meanwhile, the leaders in medicine, law, science, print journalism, television, the film and publishing industries and the foundation world come largely from the cognitive elite.  
  Almost all of the leading figures in academia are part of it. In Washington, the top echelons of federal officialdom, special interest groups, think tanks and the rest of Washington's satellitte institutions draw heavily from the cognitive elite. At the municipal level, the local businesses and political movers are often members of the cognitive elite.  
5.24.2 Giving mediocrity its due  
  Life has been increasingly good for the cognitive elite, as it has displaced the socioeconomic elites of earlier times. In the far-from-idyllic past when most of the people at the top of the cognitive distribution were farmers, housewives, workers and shop owners, many of them were also frustrated, aware that they had capabilities that were not being used,. The steps of steep rise in IQ jobs of the course of the century was to some important extent a picture of people moving from unsatisfying jobs to lucrative and interesting ones.  
  Technology has not just created more jobs for the cognitive elite, but revolutionized the way they may be done. Modern transportation has expanded the realm in which people work. Beyond that, physical separation is becoming irrelevant. A scientist passionately devotes to the study of a certain protein or an investment analyst following a market can be in daily electronic conversation with people throughout the world who share the same passion, passing drafts of work back and forth, calling up data files, doing analyses that would have required a mainframe computer and a team of assistants only a few years ago- all while sitting alone at a computer, which need not be in an office, but can as easily be in a beach house overlooking the ocean.  
  Across the occupational domain of those who work primarily with their minds, the explosion of computer and communications technologies has liberated and expanded creativity, productivity and personal freedom. They may be some costs of this physical isolation, but many people are happier and more fulfilled as a result of the reach of modern technology.  
  For a nation as a whole, the invisible migration has surely brought benefits as well. We cannot measure the gains precisely, but they are the inevitable side effects of greater efficiency in identifying intellectual talent and channelling it into high-IQ occupations. Compared to 1900 or even 1950, America in the 1990's is getting more productivity out of its stock of human capital and this presumably translates into more jobs, gains in GNP and other effects that produce more wealth for the society at large.  
5.24.3 Isolation within the cognitive elite  
  What is concerning about the emerging cognitive elite is its coalescence into a class that view society increasingly through a lens of its own. The problem is not simply that smart people rise to the top more effectively these days. If the only quality that CEOs of major corporations and movie directors and the White House inner circle has in common were their raw intelligence, things would not be so much different now than they have always been, for to some degree the most successful have always been drawn disproportionately from the most intelligent.  
  But the invisible migration of the twentieth century and continued into the twenty first century has done much more than let the most intellectually able succeed more easily. It has also segregated them and socialised them. The members of the cognitive elite are likely to have gone to the same kinds of schools, live in similar neighbourhoods, go to the same kinds of schools and restaurants, read the same magazines and newspapers, watch the same television programs, even drive the same make of cars.  
  They also tend to be ignorant of the same things. They watch far less commercial television than the average American. Their movie going tends to be highly selective. They seldom read the national tabloids that have the highest circulation figures of listen to the talk radio that has become the major form of national communication for other parts of America. This does not mean that the cognitive elite spend their lives at the ballet and reading Proust. Theirs is not a high culture, but it is distinctive enough to set them off from the rest of the country in so many important ways.  
  The isolation of the cognitive elite is by no means complete, but the statistical tendencies are strong, and the same advanced in transportation and communication that are so enhancing the professional lives of the cognitive elite will make their isolation from the rest of the public that much greater. As their common ground with the rest of society decreases, their coalescence as a new class increases. The traditional separations between the business world, the entertainment world, the university intellectuals and government are being replaced by an axis of bright people that runs through society. They already sense their kinship across these spheres of interest. This too will increase with time.  
5.24.4 The new underclass  
  A frightening, terrible and fearful trend has been occurring in developed and developing nations as a result of the extraction of intellect and the creation of intellectual ghettos- a new underclass that has neither the skills nor the intellectual competence to take care of themselves, let alone their children.  
  Single parent families, multiple fathered children, long term chronic welfare recipients, heavy drug dependence, violent and angry children. So poor are the conditions for this new underclass of below average intelligence that children unfortunate enough to be born into such conditions are statistically more likely to follow the mediocrity and failures of their parents.  
5.24.5 The “welfare” and “correctness debate” that hides this trend  
  As perverse as the trend of intellectual ghettos is as a global trend across nations, races and religions, the “welfare” and “political correctness debate” which refuses to admit its existence is verging on evil. Not only do those who refuse to admit the root cause of crime, drug dependence, unemployment and failed marriages for the millions of people who live in these below average intelligence ghettos, but they attack any person who even suggests these people have any cognitive challenges as elitists and sometimes racists.  
5.24.6 The bleak future for the underclass  
  The future is not bright for the underclass. For now, the state tolerates to some degree the cost of welfare, the levels of crime and social problems of these intellectual ghettos. But there will be a time soon when the costs of dealing with their problems will become too high.  
  When this happens, expect to see ghettos transform into their next evolutionary phase- prison settlements, where people from these areas will need passes and authority to visit other parts of the nation for which they were born a citizen. The transformation will be complete- they will have become officially second and third class citizens.  
     
     
 
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