Why does poverty exist? Why is there social pathology and human degradation? Is it always because of oppression and discrimination? No, says Professor Seymour Itzkoff of Smith College. The real reason is the tragedy of low human intelligence, and the consequent inability of humans to compete in highly complex and dynamic economic and social environments. The Road to Equality: Evolution and Social Reality, contains Itzkoff's highly controversial analysis of the failures of the welfare approach to helping the poor. It also contains his radical solution to the perennial problems of inequality in nations and the consequent turmoil and revolution. Equalize the intelligence of your nation, Itzkoff argues, and you will soon eliminate the tragic social and economic differences between large portions of the population. It is high intelligence in groups of humans that create civilization and prosperity in the first place. Merely placing individuals of lower intelligence in such environments has not ensured their success. And it never will, predicts the professor, because it violates the facts of our evolutionary and sociobiological nature.
The 21st century will change the relationship of nations to each other in the most radical manner that history has ever seen. The requirements of technological competency have put a premium on high educable intelligence. Even today we see that nations of uniformly high intelligence of various racial and ethnic heritage are pulling away from those with lower national intellectual profiles. Itzkoff writes that many of the social pathologies in nations such as the United States, as well as their relative economic decline can be so attributed. The future of human equality, he concludes, must lie in an international resolve to face up to the most basic challenge to world peace, the variability of intelligence in the human species.
