“The political process in Washington is systemically corrupt in ways that make fundamental reforms impossible. Not improbable but impossible.”

“almost all of the nation’s notably successful lawyers, physicians, engineers, physical scientists, social scientists, behavioral scientists, and tenured faculty have IQs of 120 or higher”

“What … seems to be true among Western cultures that have passed through the demographic transition, is that declines in lifetime fertility occur disproportionately among educated women and women of higher social status”

“Why not let people decide for themselves how they want to live their lives? If they make mistakes, they will have been their mistakes, not yours.”

“academic ability plays the same role in determining success that weight plays in … offensive tackles in the National Football League. … to have even a chance of getting the job, you had better weigh at least 300 pounds. The intellectual equivalent ... is an IQ … around 120.”

“the practical fact [is] that when fewer children die, fewer children need to be born to achieve the same eventual state of affairs. Intrinsic birth rates begin to decline, and eventually the population reaches a slow-or no-growth state.”

“The cliché that life is not a destination but a journey is true. If the UBI enables millions of people to pursue their dreams who would not have been able to pursue them otherwise, I count that as a success in itself.”

“In every domain in American life where competition determines success, the people in the upper echelons are, with remarkable uniformity, able.”

“Throughout the world, the premodern period is characterized by a balance between high death rates and high birth rates in which the population remains more or less constant. Then modernization brings better hygiene, nutrition, and medicine, and death rates begin to fall.”

“The UBI gives people a way of accumulating enough money to try to realize their ambitions: to go to college after all, even though they’ve got a family to support; to start their own business; or to leave Dubuque and move to Alaska.”

“members of the elite are drawn from among the academically gifted. There are exceptions, of course, but put aside the empty-headed heirs and the empty-headed celebrities who are conspicuous but not that numerous.”

“In trying to foresee changes in American life, what matters is how the distribution of intelligence is changing, more than why.”

“Under the UBI, millions more people will have portable retirement accounts and medical insurance. By the same token, the freedom of millions more people to look for a better job will be increased, and this is an essential part of incrementally finding a vocation.”

“The Elite Is Already Smart. It Needs to Be Wise.”

“If women with low scores are reproducing more rapidly than women with high scores, the distribution of scores will, other things equal, decline, no matter whether the women with the low scores came by them through nature or nurture.”

“The UBI makes it easier to find a vocation by changing jobs and easier for a person to accumulate the capital to pursue a dream.”

“a small proportion of the American population has a huge effect on our future. All we can do is try to educate members of the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, the obligations that go with the roles they play.”

“Children resemble their parents in IQ, for whatever reason, and immigrants and their descendants may not duplicate the distribution of America’s resident cognitive ability distribution.”

“A central satisfaction of life comes from the sense of doing something one values and doing it well. Being engaged in that activity regularly means that one has a vocation. A few people know early in their lives that they are called to a vocation.”

“America’s elite comprises a few million adults. But it is still an elite—a small fraction of our 300 million people. The good news is that America has gone further than any other country in opening admission to the elite to talented people whatever their origins.”

“Mounting evidence indicates that demographic trends are exerting downward pressures on the distribution of cognitive ability in the United States and that the pressures are strong enough to have social consequences.”