A Case for Raising the Elites

Nietzschean philanthropy if you will

You’ve probably come across this image at some point:

The image on the left represents “equality” while the right represents “equity”. Generally, this cartoon is used to promote the idea that providing everyone with equal resources is not enough to create equal outcomes, so we should provide extra to those who have the least, because they need it most. Everyone should have enough to be able to see the baseball game.

But, is that the best analogy to use? Ultimately, prosperity depends on progress, and I think that human progress (e.g., scientific, technological, artistic development) isn’t like looking over a fence, where any extra height above the fence doesn’t matter. I think it’s more like picking fruit from a tree.

After a while, all the low hanging fruit has been picked, and progress depends on people pushing the frontier of human achievement, reaching higher than anyone has before.

In this example, the person with the best chance of reaching the apples is also the one at a natural advantage. Therefore, striving for equity (i.e., equalizing outcomes) fails everyone.

And to be clear, the point here is not “give apples to people who already have lots of apples”, it’s “Give boxes to people who are tall”. When scientific and technological progress is made, everyone benefits, so we should be taking our tallest people and lifting them as high as we can.

Everyone is much better off (i.e., has more apples) if we allocate resources to those who can make best use of them, rather than those who most lack them. When humanity needs to achieve a goal, providing the relevant resources to the people already closest to the goal just makes the most sense.

Frustrations with Pronatalists

I felt initially inspired to write something on this topic after some conversations with pronatalists. I think babies are great, and if you want more babies in the world for babies’ sake, that makes sense! But most people in this camp seem generally most concerned with what crashing fertility rates would do to the economy rather than necessarily being pro-baby.

While most of them are also in favor of human enhancement, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone explicitly make a quality-over-quantity argument when it comes to addressing the economic concerns of the fertility crisis. In this case, it would probably involve something like subsidizing IVF for people with economically valuable traits in order to aggressively avoid regression towards the mean and create more positive outliers.

Instead, the policy suggestions I see most often from the pronatalist crowd, despite being disproportionately transhumanist, basically amount to regulation on contraceptive methods and memetic shifts towards conservatism. Which I really, really don’t think will work. And regressive policy for anything biomedical strikes me as pretty deeply against the interests of humans.

Having children is quite hard, and so long as contraception is available on black markets, you can bet it will be used. I also don’t see why we’d want a bunch of random babies raised by people who didn’t want to be parents (which almost certainly still wouldn’t put us past replacement) when we could slow down, think about what we’re doing, and work toward a future that’s better for everyone involved.

Frustrations with Leftists

Both pronatalism and human enhancement are pretty fringe.

I think the general intuition to lift up people who are already high exists in the hearts of many. The most mainstream example is gifted programs in schools. My guess is that the majority of people, even many leftists, still hold the position that gifted programs are net-positive.

But the opposite intuition seems to exist in some parts of the left. As far as I can tell, the general direction this has been going in has looked like: “let’s give no boxes to the person most likely to reach the apple tree, and then be surprised when we don’t have any apples”.

Needless to say, doing this will quite likely have catastrophic outcomes each time it succeeds.

Going Higher

Gifted programs and human enhancement in particular seem extraordinarily important, as most of the genuinely pressing human frontiers to advance largely depend on general intelligence and quality of thought.

“Great man” theories of science are overstated, but often enough one person genuinely figured out something nobody else did or likely could have in any reasonable amount of time. Darwin, for example, took existing (largely wrong) knowledge, traveled the world, recognized patterns, and fundamentally changed how we understand biology and life itself.

Getting even one potential Darwin is almost certainly worth more than getting ten potential average biology professors. And you are much more likely to get another Darwin through improving cognition in biology professors by 20% than you are through improving cognition in a bunch of randomly selected people by 20%. A small increase in general intelligence and knowledge in the right people unlocks a disproportionately large volume of new possible advances across physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, and more.

Human progress is driven by outliers, so we should be trying to increase variance, not reduce it. We should be taking our (positive) outliers and helping them go even further out.