Yet they are necessarily confined to a miniscule number of people — in Harvard’s case, to the elite within the Harvard elite and in the MacArthur award case to a wider but still narrow credentialed (and usually liberal) elite. They are also vulnerable to the subjective bias of the awarders, whether they are liberal in the MacArthur case or libertarian-conservative in the Thiel one.
It is time to think much bigger: Why not provide a universal basic income for all geniuses so that they have an opportunity to devote their lives to pure thought undisturbed by the humdrum concerns of daily life? This idea was floated in an intriguing sub-stack called “Ideas Sleep Furiously” but could do with a much wider discussion.
UBI for geniuses might work something like this. Schoolchildren would be given a succession of IQ tests during their schoolyears: IQ tests because they are the best method we have of assessing raw intellectual ability rather than school learning. A succession because everybody can have an off day — the physicist Richard Feynman liked telling people that he had only scored 124 in an IQ test. Children who score 145 or above would then be offered a life-long genius award. These awards wouldn’t need to be lavish — just enough so that geniuses could afford to live a middle-class lifestyle. They could start at, say $75,000 a year and go up by $25,000 increments every decade. The payments could expire if our geniuses decided to take paid employment but then resume if they decided to “drop out” again.
There are some obvious objections to the idea. One is that not all people with high IQs would turn out to be geniuses because geniuses also need certain personality traits such as grit and focus. This is only half-true: high IQs are a necessary if not a sufficient condition for high levels of cognitive achievement. They are also positively correlated with other desirable cognitive traits such as focus and endurance. Given the relative simplicity of testing for IQ and the clear harm that is imposed in allocating rare talent to humdrum jobs, paying genius awards to a few non-geniuses seems like a reasonable cost.
A second objection is that UBI for geniuses would simply reward people who have already won a winning lottery ticket in life. The compassionate answer to this objection is that many geniuses find it hard to relate to the wider society. They are too preoccupied by intellectual puzzles (Isaac Newton went into such deep trances that he would forget to eat) or too introverted to talk to others (Paul Dirac, one of the pioneers of quantum physics, spoke so little that his colleagues at Cambridge invented a unit called the “Dirac,” or one word per hour). “Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide,” as John Dryden put it.
UBI will clearly be good for the geniuses themselves (and those who don’t need it can renounce it by getting a job) but the same can be said about other troubled groups (San Francisco is introducing UBI for transgender people, for example). The more compelling answer is that UBI for geniuses will massively benefit society as a whole. UBI is good for us as well as them.
The German psychologist Heiner Rindermann and his collaborators have taken three widely used international test scores, PISA, TIMMS and PIRLS, and converted them into a single “cognitive ability score” for almost a hundred countries. They demonstrated not only that countries with higher average IQ scores are richer than the rest but that the top 5% have the biggest impact on overall wealth. If you want to improve the lot of the average Joe, then the best way to do it is to treat the brightest well.
UBI for geniuses would promote equality of opportunity in three ways: by introducing universal testing in schools, and thereby discovering more hidden high achievers; by giving all students, but particularly the poor, for whom a guaranteed income means more than for the rich, an incentive to do well academically; and by demonstrating that that there is a root to success other than sport and pop music. A 2016 paper by two economists, David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, and Laura Giuliano, now at UC Santa Cruz, demonstrated that the introduction of universal screening in a large Florida school district led to a substantial increase in the fraction of poor and minority children who were put into gifted education programs. (The percentage of non-Hispanic African Americans rose from 12% to 17% and of Hispanics from 16% to 27%, while the White percentage fell from 61% to 43%). UBI for geniuses would do more for America’s stalled upward mobility than anything since the GI Bill after the Second World War.
UBI for geniuses might also provide an instrument for leveling up, both between and within countries. In his new book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move to a Lot Like the Ones They Left, Garett Jones of George Mason University points out that just seven countries out of nearly 200 (the US, China, Japan, South Korea, France, Germany and the United Kingdom) are responsible for the vast majority of the world’s patents, research grants, scientific publications patents and Nobel prizes. The others could catch up with these “idea treasuries” by either introducing UBI for their native-born geniuses or, more boldly still, offering no-strings-attached genius grants to high-IQ foreigners who are willing to relocate. Likewise, the lion’s share of advanced intellectual work in the US takes place in a handful of knowledge clusters. If the federal government makes the mistake of rejecting the UBI for geniuses idea, then ambitious states outside the magic circle could seize on it instead to improve their long-term prospects.
In the wake of Christine McVie’s death on November 30, we have been repeatedly reminded of her 1977 song “Don’t Stop (thinking about tomorrow)” with its cheerful assurance that “it’ll be here better than before.” Bill Clinton made the song the unofficial theme tune of his administration. But since that administration ended, “tomorrow” has lost much of its promise. In the West, large majorities of parents expect their children to be worse off than them. Across the world, people are terrified by the seemingly insoluble problem of global warming. There is no better way to restore our faith in the future than to increase the amount of brainpower available to humankind. And there is no easier way to increase that brainpower than to provide geniuses with the wherewithal to devote their lives to doing what only they can do: thinking thoughts that have never been thought before and solving problems that have hitherto been deemed insoluble.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.