In general, it seems like you are attributing all academic performance to some innate "intelligence" in the singular. This is just a bad assumption. There are many factors behind how well you do in school, and most of them are quite obviously social. That doesn't mean that your parents academic performance doesn't influence your, but there's no basis for claiming that it's genetic. We can help people do better, and we have done so. Of course, what we're doing now isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean it's not worth it.
This is contrary to the available science. IQ and earnings are strongly correlated.
There is a perfect correlation between the two
If it was easy to produce smart kids then we would already do it, since smart people are so much more valuable to society the small amounts it requires to add that extra value would be nothing. But no country has managed to do this so far, its just a slow climb that follows the same trend in every western society no matter what policies they implemented.
Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?
What you've said is unfalsifiable voodoo mumbo-jumbo. Even if someone proved you wrong here and started the experiment with the poor child at newborn level, which is what people do when these bad faith criticisms are lobbed, you'd just claim that the DNA of the baby inherited generational trauma, which is what people with your bad faith criticism resort to once the criticism is inevitably proven wrong.
Doesn’t really work like that. IQ is heavily influenced by environmental factors.
Unfortunately, most smart and educated people are actually doing the opposite. That is, not having kids.
This goes against all of the scientific literature we have. Intelligence is determined by genetics. It can be artificially lowered via poor socio-economic conditions, but it mostly cannot be lifted by higher socio economic conditions. In laymans terms, a traumatic life can make a child who was otherwise going to be smart not so smart, but a good life cannot make a child who was going to be dumb intelligent. Socioeconomic conditions can lower the intelligence determined by genetics, they cannot improve intelligence determined by genetics.
It seems folly to boil something as complex and social as economics to a single input like IQ to draw such strong conclusions
Yeah, on average, poor people score a few points low than the average for rich people. true. But this is not an absolute as the post's author seems to believe.
It doesn't mean all poor people are dumb, or that you are automatically smarter than someone who is poorer than you. Picture mentally two bell curves with a lot of overlap and very long tails. Things are in reality way more nuanced than this dumb statement that poor == dumb.
On the aggregate, it is a useful datapoint, it means that probably as a society, you should reserve some more resources for education in poorer neighborhoods.
And by the way - free healthcare and free higher education are actually very good things that worked like a charm.
I hope you will not have children, also.
Meanwhile we DO KNOW that nurturing have a strong effect. This is a fact.
And then you have the problem of how to ensure that smart people have more kids. Are you going to force smart people to have kids? raise their taxes? prison? What about lower intelligence people? what do you propose? compulsory sterilization and abortion? As you can see, even if we knew for sure that smart people having relatively more offspring would actually work, The policy changes to enact that are a complete minefield of ethical and practical problems. So, at least in our society, this is clearly not a solution.
But, on the other side we do know that we can have interventions on nutrition, education and other such stuff that do have a demonstrable effect on increasing a series of variables that we collectively call intelligence.
You have, right now, for kids that already living, not some hypothetical future Einstein's offspring, tools to raise their intelligence and to make the most of their genetic potential, even if on average, their potential is a bit smaller (and always remember, intelligence is normally distributed, outliers abound, and the difference between the average of both groups is not that big to start, meaning there is a lot of overlap in relative terms, and considering we have for more poor people than rich people, is very likely that by virtude of the sheer numbers, you have more genius individuals, in absolute quantity, than on the upper classes, even if the average tends in favor of the upper classes.
And as intelligence is normally distributed, by giving poor kids a chance, you will even be able to identify among them some high potential individuals and give them the nurturing they need to reach what they are innately able to if given the chance.
So, what is your policy choice? Chase a pipe dream, while increasing inequality, something that historically always led to violence, or do something that is feasible, doable, ethical and fair?
So instead of asking "why are poor people fat, we should fix that!" you can also ask "why are dumb people fat, we should fix that!". The second gives a lot of different angles and can help find solutions the first question wont find.
This is one of the many drawbacks of socialism, even the "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" that everyone seems to be obsessed with lately in the U.S. It assumes government paper-pushers are the smartest people around with the highest I.Q. ever, and everyone else is just a dumb lightweight. It's all about that soft bigotry of low expectations.
Society as a whole is better off => every single member is better of.
There is no such relationship. However, since every individual directly contributes to the total productivity of society, we want every member to reach their maximum potential and one way to achieve that is to introduce welfare so that people at the bottom don't have to be homeless or starve because we want them to have a second chance at life.