Want Your Country to Thrive? Give Geniuses a Universal Basic Income
The best way to help average citizens is to treat the brightest well.
A UBI might mean more E = mc2
Photographer: Bettmann/Bettmann via Getty Images
One of the most troubling problems of our time is why intellectual progress is stalling. Governments and corporations throw vast resources at knowledge-creation and yet intellectual breakthroughs are getting rarer and innovations punier. A 2011 study of US data on creativity and originality came to a devastating conclusion: “The results indicate creative thinking is declining over time among Americans of all ages, especially in kindergarten through third grade. The decline is steady and persistent.”
Commentators have suggested various explanations for why this is happening, from rising inequality to the sheer accumulation of knowledge. None of them is convincing: The late 19th century combined high degrees of inequality with extraordinary intellectual creativity, while the accumulation of knowledge surely provides ingenious people with more material to play with. Here is a more straightforward explanation: We’re not producing enough geniuses.