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Comment by laurent92 | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think there has ever been an age of a greatly efficient and capable society.

And… is it possible? In this world, less than 5% are producing the actual products and the rest are working around and producing, basically, paperwork, which may be extremely important (such as Accounting, HR, compliance) but only to other people. Which, in turns, raises requirements in more accounting and HR and OSHA and…

Paretto’s corollary law was that 50% of the work was performed by the square root of the company. Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?

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> Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?

If I buy some sneakers, they'll be sewn by a low-paid worker in a poor country, shipped by low-paid sailors, trucked to warehouses by low-paid drivers, picked and packed by low-paid workers, and driven to my door by low-paid drivers.

It ain't Facebook programmers on six-figure salaries who are feeding the rest of the population.

I love this.

"programmers on six-figure salaries" probably wrote the systems that coordinate and optimise the low-paid tasks you mention.

And who exactly benefits from those optimizations? Do the delivery drivers get to take a leisurely drive, or are they just expected to make more deliveries "thanks" to their optimized routes?

Have you considered that Facebook enables the transfer of power to the US dollar which enables economies like the USA and Europe to buy cheaper from other countries and impose their standards? This is not something that's accessible to most of the countries in the world, whom their main struggle is how to finance their imports.

> If I buy some sneakers, they'll be sewn by a low-paid worker in a poor country, shipped by low-paid sailors, trucked to warehouses by low-paid drivers, picked and packed by low-paid workers, and driven to my door by low-paid drivers.

We consider this normal, because it has been happening for quite a while and painted in a negative fashion lately (Trumpism/Nationalism) but the reality, if you had an island somewhere, and you where establishing a country, you can't ask all these people to do that without some power-transfer that you hold over these countries/populations.

> less than 5% are producing the actual products

This is also true in the military, where a tiny fraction are trigger pullers. It is worth picturing what an army with no logistics personnel would look like.

I think we already have that (AlQada, ISIS, Haqqani, etc...)

Aren’t the Haqqani network involved in significant smuggling operations?

You don’t think logistics is a massive part of those organizations? From fund raising, purchasing, transport, etc? I have no doubt the numbers involved dwarf the number doing the actual fighting.

> Paretto’s corollary law was that 50% of the work was performed by the square root of the company. Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?

What makes you think the square root of the company neatly aligns with high-IQ people? There are plenty of smart people who use their intelligence to find ways to avoid work, or to get others to do work for them, or to just amass power/influence in an organization by increasing head counts and making busy work, etc etc. Why assume that “smart” equals “having the company’s best interests in mind”?

This. You want "Get good sh*t done" people. IQ doesn't mean much if you don't know how to execute things and provide stakeholder value.

> Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?

Sure, if you could organize them and direct them without too much overhead. And if they are perfectly compliant and don't want to do something else.

... and if we remove people who fail the IQ120+ test from power. Including economic power, meaning no more inheritance of capital.

Whether it's possible depends on what "greatly efficient" means to you, but we could do better. There are numerous ways to improve our tax system, improve education, improve civic participation, reduce corruption and regulatory capture, improve outcomes and overhead of the legal system, incentivise innovation without prohibitive patents, reduce beurocratic overhead...

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