Democracy and the cognitive elite

Inspired by the college hoax/cognitive elite thread here, Maximos unearthed an older piece of his on the theme of the crisis of political legitimacy coming as a result of the natural population-sorting by cognitive ability, "in which the downward mobility of the below-average, average, and even many of the above-average would collide with fabulist visions of universal upward mobility in the New Economy." Excerpt:

As regards the new economy of services, high finance, and god-king CEOs, highly remunerative compensation ultimately correlates with cognitive ability - this was the primary thesis of The Bell Curve, for those who remember - and this fact, operating in tandem with deindustrialization and globalization, both increases the rewards accruing to the cognitive elite and decreases returns to the average, who increasingly find themselves in competition with the average masses of nations at much lower levels of economic development. Education can do nothing to alter this reality, inasmuch as cognitive ability is only marginally malleable under environmental influences, if at all. An emphasis upon educational reform in this connection could actually have perverse effects, such as the devaluation of credentials, leading to market demands for ever more credentialization as a condition of employment, and the erection of additional financial barriers to economic advancement, as the demand for higher education drives up the cost, relentlessly. (Snip)

In the end, the circle cannot be squared, and the dilemmas of globalization still hold. Structural factors dictate the exacerbation of the new inequality, with all that this entails, and this because those structural factors have essentially marketized heritable qualities not amenable to amelioration; simultaneously, those structural factors have developed concurrently with an increasing pursuit of efficiency through arbitrage and labour substitution.

And:

[T]he contradictions are sharpening, as the gulf between our romantic/gnostic notions of intelligence, aptitude, and educability, and the pitiless realities of IQ and economic opportunity, opens out upon a fathomless abyss. Such contradictions are always resolved; the only questions concern the timing and the means.

Shorter Maximos: Our economy is by its very structure stacked in favor of the cognitive elite, and life is going to get harder and harder for those who did not inherit the most favorable genes, until they get fed up with it and rise up.

This came to mind last night when I finally got around to watching the DVD of "Demographic Winter." It's well worth buying and watching and sharing, but I hope the producers dial back on the doomy music in the sequel, and let the sociologists and demographers present facts and data, which are sufficient to make their case. Anyway, toward the end of the film the Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker and others are talking about the connection between family structure and the ability to thrive in a modern economy. Social science data overwhelmingly demonstrate that on average, children who are raised in a stable two-parent household have tremendous advantages in learning over children born out of wedlock (40 percent of all US births today), or raised by a single parent. In a meritocratic economy, these children will tend to rise to cognitive elite status.

And the elite will not reproduce themselves, if current trends hold. Here's University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, from the film:

This is where it gets weird, though. Who's reproducing? This is where you have a demographic, economic paradox. Those who can best maintain a large family are not having those families. And those who can least sustain large families tend to have more children.

The University of Chicago's Robert Michael says in the film that in our modern economy, "Over time, the range of disadvantage is growing." How will it resolve itself? No one says.

There's a fascinating aspect to all this that I hadn't considered, but which is taken up in the film's last segment. Regnerus says:

The evolutionary biology of sex is all about reproducing. If we're hard-wired to reproduce, why are so many people not reproducing? ... The most intelligent people in the world are not interested in reproducing.

Philip Longman, the secular liberal demographer (who looks worried to death in the film), adds:

Darwinism assumes that organisms always breed up to the limits of their resources, and this is what causes the competition, the survival of the fittest under the theory. And yet, here we look and see there's one species that stands in exception to that.

Two years ago, Longman wrote a very controversial essay in Foreign Policy, arguing from a secular materialist perspective that evolution favors patriarchy. Understand, as a secular liberal he admits that he finds this objectionable -- but he doesn't see that the data point to any other conclusion:

Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating traditional religious values akin to the Bible's injunction to honor thy mother and father.

Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.

In "Demographic Winter," he notes that the only people reproducing at and beyond replacement level are religious conservatives and fundamentalists. He says:

Certain kinds of human beings are on the road to extinction -- people who, for lack of faith, don't go forth and multiply.

How are we in the US going to resolve paradox Regnerus identifies in a way that allows us to keep our modern meritocratic economy? That may well be the most important political question of this century.