The posts These are not the villains you’re looking for and The Expendables: The Millions of Americans that Society Has No Use For got butchered in the final editing process and parts were illegible or repeated. The posts have been re-edited, hopefully with fewer errors.
From The Expendables: The Millions of Americans that Society Has No Use For, I added:
Going back to the topic of IQ, according to a viral 2017 lecture by Dr. Jordan Peterson, there are very few employment opportunities for individuals with IQs below 80 or so, which is 10-15% of the general adult US population:
A commonly cited study shows a threshold for low-skilled jobs to be an IQ of 80, and an IQ 85-95 for lower-middle-class jobs:
An IQ of 88-90 roughly corresponds to an AFQT score of 31, which is the cutoff for eligibility for enlisting in the Army or the Marines. Below this threshold, according to Dr. Peterson citing research from the DoD, there is no suitable task for such individuals such that their low intelligence is not too much of a hindrance, so this means up to a fifth of Americans are not smart enough to enlist.
Thus, 30-40 million Americans, who have IQs below 80-85, are either unemployable or barely contributing if employed. They don’t contribute much to consumer spending either, being that they tend to earn so little money. Covid tended to disproportionately affect these people, either by living in densely populated subsidized or group housing, and or by working in occupations that made them especially susceptible to contracting Covid.
I don’t think policy makers, on either side of the aisle, grasp or understand the extent of the situation. Many millions of people’s lives are blighted beyond any hope or repair. These are people who got off on the wrong foot decades ago, and are now so far off the trail, if not having already veered off the cliff. Or, in invoking Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery, were delt a bad hand of cards genetically. We’re not talking about something that can be fixed with ‘more education,’ ‘skills training,’ or ‘more welfare’. Because genes play a large role, whether it’s IQ or susceptibility to mental illness or addiction, means that social programs will be of limited efficiency. And as discussed above, skills training or education does not work for the 10-15% of the population who are not smart enough to benefit much anyway. Even if drugs were banned, the damage is already done to these people, and it’s not possible to raise IQ [0] . Even successful families in which there every possible environmental advantage, have some mental illness or other problems, suggesting a strong genetic contributor. And multiply by thousands of families over many generations, and it adds up to a lot of people who are not contributing.