I agree that intellectuals were in favor of communism when communism was a new thing. (These days, in the post-communist countries, it is the other way round.) But I still think that on average, smarter people generate more positive externalities. Basically, most useful things we see around us were invented by someone smart.
Caplan’s argument about outsourcing less challenging tasks to others has a few problem. First, smart people doing simple things is a waste of talent only because the smart people are rare (and if you let them do simple things, it means that the complicated things will not get done). In a society of Einsteins it wouldn’t matter that some of them do the dishes, because there would still be enough of them left to invent the cool stuff. Second, anecdotal evidence suggests that the division of labor works worse than advertised; a few of my friends have complained to me about horrible job that was done by various manual workers e.g. when they hired someone to build or reconstruct their houses, so they ultimately had to find some tutorials on YouTube and fix the things themselves.
I agree about the prediction markets. (However, the main argument against them seems to be that the dumb people would immediately waste lost of money there, and then go and cause social unrest.)
I agree that intellectuals were in favor of communism when communism was a new thing. (These days, in the post-communist countries, it is the other way round.) But I still think that on average, smarter people generate more positive externalities. Basically, most useful things we see around us were invented by someone smart.
Caplan’s argument about outsourcing less challenging tasks to others has a few problem. First, smart people doing simple things is a waste of talent only because the smart people are rare (and if you let them do simple things, it means that the complicated things will not get done). In a society of Einsteins it wouldn’t matter that some of them do the dishes, because there would still be enough of them left to invent the cool stuff. Second, anecdotal evidence suggests that the division of labor works worse than advertised; a few of my friends have complained to me about horrible job that was done by various manual workers e.g. when they hired someone to build or reconstruct their houses, so they ultimately had to find some tutorials on YouTube and fix the things themselves.
I agree about the prediction markets. (However, the main argument against them seems to be that the dumb people would immediately waste lost of money there, and then go and cause social unrest.)