Why the intelligence of each of us individually does not matter at all.
The smartest people, be they psychologists, anthropologists or economists, believe that intelligence is at the heart of human achievement. They vote for the smartest candidates in elections, entrust the most respected experts to formulate economic policy, attribute discoveries to the genius of outstanding researchers and, most importantly, endlessly find out how the human mind developed in general.
They do not see the forest behind the tree. Humanity owes its success not to the qualities of individuals. People conquered the planet not because they had a big brain: the hefty brain of the Neanderthal did not prevent him from remaining only a predatory ape.
A 1.2-liter pot and a bunch of wonderful add-ons like a language were a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of civilization. One economy does not work better than another because it is not ruled by smarter guys, and great discoveries do not happen where there are more smart people.
The achievements of humanity are a purely network phenomenon. Only by dividing labor, inventing trade and narrow specialization, people discovered a way to improve the quality of life and labor productivity, develop technology and deepen the piggy bank of general knowledge. There is ample evidence of this: the correlation between technological development and population connectivity in Oceania, the loss of technology by isolated groups like the indigenous population of Tasmania, or the flourishing of trading cities in Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Southeast Asia.
The achievements of humanity are born of the collective mind. People are the neurons of civilization. Doing each of our own business, improving in it and sharing the results of our labors, we have learned to create things that we don't even understand. In his essay "I, the Pencil," economist Leonard Reid observes that no one in the world knows how to make a pencil - that knowledge is distributed among thousands of miners, woodcutters, designers, and factory workers.
That is why, Friedrich von Hayek observed, a planned economy never works. The wisest man cannot better distribute goods than a collective brain. The idea of the intellect organized from below, discovered by Adam Smith, repeated by Darwin and explained by Hayek in the wonderful book "The Use of Knowledge in Society", in my opinion, should be in service with every thinking person.
Promotional video: