I would like to add that even if the median human intelligence is decreasing, the current generation has the largest absolute number of very bright people alive at any given time. This is a natural function of the large human population. If the stability of civilization rests not on the median human, but the coordination and mobilization of large numbers of cognitively gifted humans, then perhaps we should not worry too much in the short to medium term. Even with stabilizing world populations we’ll have a generation or two of large numbers of brights before differential fitness of the smart and dull really start eroding the numbers of the former.
The existence of so many mentally handicapped people also shows an inherent problem with speculations about building libertopias on, say, the oceans: About a third of the adult population in organic societies, as opposed to artificial ones in utopian experiments, needs some level of zoo-keeping because it can't take of itself properly and pull its own weight, and not just because of cognitive deficiencies. My 48 year old sister has had to live with our mother her entire adult life because of epilepsy (controlled with medication), borderline retardation and, we now suspect, high-functioning autism, even though she can hold down a job as a cashier at a Wal-Mart. Yet she has had numerous health problems, covered by health insurance, which have already cost more than her lifetime's earnings could buy if she had to pay for her treatment out of pocket.
Because so many people have problems like my sister's, developed countries have to divert resources through political means to take care of them, at the expense of the more self-reliant people. Would seasteading libertopias have room for prisons, homeless shelters, drug rehab centers, psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes for elderly poor people like my recently deceased grandmother, and other zoo-keeping institutions? And what about the employable people like my sister who still can't generate enough net wealth to sustain themselves?
If you accept the frame of viewing government as a "business," and its citizens as "customers," then the libertopian seasteading proposal announces that its proposed new model of "government" doesn't want to "do business" with a good chunk of humanity. By leaving the people of the abyss on land, the libertopian seastead continues the trend in capitalism of privatizing gains and socializing losses, in this case through literal segregation.
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