What is the problem with sending people from the first World with low IQ and exchanging them from people in the third world with high IQ?
Firstly, contributions to society shouldn't be measured purely in terms of IQ. There are many ways to contribute. Let's take an extreme example:
A friend of mine has two sons, one of whom has Downs Syndrome. He is never going to be able to work or support himself, and his IQ is limited. Yet, he's one of the happiest people I know. He loves dancing and music and art (and he's a brilliant artist by the way) and to see him enjoy himself makes other people genuinely happy. Under a regime where people with lower IQs are all sent to live together in some IQ-exchange programme, we would all be deprived of the joy he reminds us about that lies in the simpler things in life. But by annexing him to live with other people of a lower IQ, aren't we saying that we only value high IQ?
You may or may not personally value the example I've given. But I do. And moreover, in a world where we are continually urged to be mindful, to be aware, to be present and in the moment so we can truly experience life, people like him are valuable.
Secondly, let's assume the idea has legs and we do enter into an IQ-exchange programme. What you then do is create a society (the low IQ's) who cannot ever progress and improve their condition. Moreover, they may not even be able to function - who would be the doctors, scientists, managers, accountants, solicitors, teachers etc? We know that within the normal distribution, criminality and IQ/education are linked. When a society doesn't have the infrastructure to function, anarchy ensues.
Finally, Dr Meredith Belbin (a psychologist famous for devising a test to see how teams function) actually tested a version of this idea. Except he put the high-IQs in a team, expecting them to be able to deliver outstanding results.
What was at first deemed to be likely was that high-intellect teams would succeed where lower intellect teams would not. However, the outcome of this research was that certain teams, predicted to be excellent based on intellect, failed to fulfil their potential. In fact, it became apparent by looking at the various combinations that it was not intellect, but balance, which enabled a team to succeed. Successful “companies” were characterised by the compatibility of the roles that their members played while unsuccessful companies were subject to role conflict. Using information from psychometric tests, predictions could be made on the roles that individuals played and ultimately on whether the company would be more likely to figure among the winners or losers.
One interesting point to observe from the experiment was that individuals reacted very differently within the same broad situation. It is a common experience that individual differences can cause a group to fall apart. People just don’t fit in. On the other hand, variation in personal characteristics can become a source of strength if they are recognised and taken account of. So understanding the nature of these differences can become an essential first step in the management of people, providing one can recognise what is useful for a given situation and what is not. The most successful companies tended to be those with a mix of different people, i.e. those with a range of different behaviours.
