http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/the-war-on-stupid-people/485618/
"As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”
While the article correctly identifies some problems with what it (I think justifiably) terms the “fetishization” of IQ and academic performance, the author’s conclusions are insupportable. Government incentives to companies that resist automation, in order to preserve jobs? Sure, why not shut down automobile factories and turn back to buggy whip making too?
There are changes to be made. Our society’s current conviction that higher education is the only, or even most desirable, path for everyone is deeply flawed. But trying to turn the clock backwards has never been a valid option.
This article touches on a lot of issues. If increasingly larger masses of people don’t have the basic cognitive ability to support themselves with work in our increasingly tech automated world, should they simply be given a guaranteed basic income to survive?
There’s also the phenomenon of assortive mating. People tend to pair up with people of similar educational attainment level. This is contributing to increasing income inequality and increasing class & cognitive divide. Assortive mating is even observable in the Sugar phenomenon where rich educated men prefer educated sugar babies over non-educated sugar babies.