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by Eric S. Raymond, first published 2018
I think we all better hope we get germ-line genetic engineering and
really effective nootropics real soon now. Because I think I have seen
what the future looks like without these technologies, and it sucks.
A hundred years ago, 1918, marked the approximate end of the period when
even middle-class families in the U.S. and Great Britain routinely had
servants. During the inter-war years availability of domestic servants
became an acute problem further and further up the SES scale, nearly
highlighted by the National Council on Household Employment's 1928
report on the problem. The institution of the servant class was in
collapse; would-be masters were priced out of the market by rising wages
for factory jobs and wider working opportunities for women (notably as
typists).
But there was a supply-side factor as well; potential hires were
unwilling to be servants and have masters -- increasingly reluctant to
be in service even when such jobs were still the best return they could
get on their labor. The economic collapse of personal service coincided
with an increasing rejection of the social stratification that had gone
with it. Society as a whole became flatter and much more meritocratic.
There are unwelcome but powerful reasons to expect that this trend has
already begun to reverse.
An early bellwether was Murray and Hernstein's The Bell Curve in 1994;
one of their central concerns was that meritocratic elevation of the
brightest out of various social strata and ethnicities of poorer folks
might exert a dyscultural effect, depriving their birth peers of talent
and leadership. They also worried that a society increasingly run by its
cognitive elites would complexify in ways that would make life
progressively more difficult for those on the wrong end of the IQ bell
curve, eventually driving many out of normal economic life and into
crime.
What they barely touched was the implication that these trends might
combine to produce increased social stratification -- the bright getting
richer and the dull getting poorer, driving the ends of the SES scale
further apart in a self-reinforcing way.
Only a few years later social scientists began noticing that assortative
mating among the new meritocratic elite was a thing. What this hints at
is that meritocracy may be driving us towards a society that is not just
economically but genetically stratified.
Now comes Genetic analysis of social-class mobility in five longitudinal
studies, a powerful meta-analysis summarized
The takeaway from this paper is that upward social mobility is predicted
by genetics. And, as the summary notes: "\[H\]igher SES families tend to
have higher polygenic scores on average \[and thus more upward
mobility\] --- which is what one might expect from a society that is at
least somewhat meritocratic."
Indeed, the obvious historical interpretation of this result is that
this is where meritocracy got us. At the beginning of the Flat Century
meritocrats had a lot of genetic outliers to uplift out of what they
called the "deserving poor"; which is another way of saying that back
then, the genetic potential for upward mobility was more widely
distributed in lower SESes *because it had not yet been selected out by
the uplifters.* This model is consistent with what primary sources tell
us people believed about themselves and their peers.
But now it's 2018. Poverty cultures are reaching down to unprecedented
levels of self-degradation; indicators of this are out-of-wedlock
births, rates of drug abuse, and levels of interpersonal violence and
suicide. 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. And not just the usual urban minority suspects,
either, but poor whites as well; this is the burden of books like
Charles Murray's Coming Apart. J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, and the
opioid-abuse statistics.
It's hard not to look at this and not see the prophecies of The Bell
Curve, a quarter century ago, coming hideously true. We have assorted
ourselves into increasing cognitive inequality by class. and the poor
are paying an ever heavier price for this. Furthermore, the natural
outcome of the process is average IQ and other class differentiating
abilities abilities are on their way to becoming genetically locked in.
The last jaw of the trap is the implosion of jobs for unskilled and
semi-skilled labor. Retail, a traditional entry ramp into the workforce,
has been badly hit by e-commerce, and that's going to get worse.
Fast-food chains are automating as fast as political morons pass "living
wage" laws; that's going to have an especially hard impact on
minorities.
But we ain't seen nothing yet; there's a huge disruption coming when
driverless cars and trucks wipe out an entire tier of the economy
related to commercial transport. That's 1 in 15 workers in the U.S.,
overwhelmingly from lower SES tiers. What are they going to do in the
brave new world? What are their increasingly genetically disadvantaged
children going to do?
Here's where we jump into science fiction, because the only answer I can
see is: become servants. And that is how the Flat Century dies.
Upstairs, downstairs isn't just our past, it's our future. Because in a
world where production of goods and routinized service is increasingly
dominated by robots and AI, the social role of servant as a person who
takes orders will increasingly be the only thing that an unskilled
person has left to offer above the economic level of digging ditches or
picking fruit.
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. Victorian homilies
about knowing your place will once again describe a sound adaptive
strategy. The rich will live in mansions again, because the live-in help
has to sleep somewhere...
This prospect disgusts me; I'm a child of the Flat Century, a
libertarian. But I've been increasingly seeing it as inevitable, and the
genetic analysis I previously cited has tipped me over into writing
about it.
Some people who seem dimly to apprehend what's coming are talking up
universal basic income as a solution. This is the long-term idiocy
corresponding exactly to the short-term idiocy of the
$15-an-hour-or-fight campaigners. UBI would be a trap, not a solution,
and in any case has the usual problem of schemes that rely on other
peoples' money -- as the demands of the clients increase you run out of
it, and what then?
There is only one way out of this, and that's science-fictional too.
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. If we can narrow the cognitive-ability spread enough, the
economic forces driving increasing divergence between upper and lower
SES will abate.
There's a good novel in this scenario, I think. Thirty years from now in
a neo-Victorian U.S. full of manors, a breakthrough discovery in
intelligence amplification gets made. Human nature being what it is,
evil people who like their place at the top of a pecking order -- and
good people who fear destabilization of society -- will want to suppress
and control it. What comes next?
In the real world, I don't want to be living in that novel at age 90; it
would be a miserable place for too many, heavy with resentment and
curdled dreams. So let's get on that technical problem; intelligence
increase *now,* dammit!