IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-37301-3_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Meritocracy, Intelligence and Welfare

In: How to Save the Underclass

Author

Listed:
  • Robin Marris

Abstract

Why should the ‘overclass’ care about the underclass? The fact that a significant part of human ability is inherited puts society in a bind. We cannot redistribute intelligence and it is difficult to redistribute income without affecting incentives. Therefore it is vitally important to know how much ability is inherited, how much can be changed by education and what are the effects of inequality on economic welfare. These questions are the task of this chapter. How much can we understand if we treat the brain as a ‘black box’ only studied from outside? What is IQ? How valid are statistical results relating a person’s early IQ to their subsequent place in the meritocracy? How strong is the hereditary factor in the final statistical distribution of earnings? Some answers to these questions can be gleaned from the ‘shape’ of the earnings distribution. It appears to be roughly bell-shaped at the bottom, moderately skewed in the middle and highly skewed at the top. Fairly straightforward economics can explain this. What are the implications of these findings for the measurement of welfare? There is a controversy in economics, originally set going by V. Pareto, as to whether welfare is a measurable quantity. I strongly believe that it is. Otherwise economics is politically impotent. For example if one is not allowed to conceive of quantifiable welfare one cannot even discuss whether it is better to have low wages and low unemployment, as in the US, or higher wages and more unemployment, as in Europe.

Suggested Citation

  • Robin Marris, 1996. "Meritocracy, Intelligence and Welfare," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: How to Save the Underclass, chapter 5, pages 127-171, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37301-3_5
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230373013_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37301-3_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.