Society absolutely needs to more correctly incentivize smart people to 'get together' to form child creating and raising units (families).

Maybe society should focus on supporting high quality environments for raising children well.

This probably includes a bunch of budget expensive things like...

  * Rich interaction between smart adults and children, at low density
  * Ensure good breakfast and lunch at minimum
  * year round childcare
  * Every child great medical care

There can be also a softer version of it, which is that cultural richness and focus on education are easily transmitted within families. A society that doesn't value culture and education is going to produce less educated families with even less educated children.

The movie did have an unfortunate eugenic implication, which is doubly unfortunate because it wasn’t even necessary for the plot. Society can just get dumb due to people not valuing education.

Genetically we’re not that different from cavemen, so the floor (without any weird eugenic theories about dumb people breeding too much) is “tamed caveman.”

It’s not the stupid people’s fault. They’ve always bred. The problem is smart people used to as well, and now we’ve stopped. Because of lots of reasons that make sense for the individuals:

- childfree is probably more enjoyable

- kids expensive and student debt crippling, so let’s delay starting till we’re 37 and own a home

- scary time/place to raise kids if you think about it too much

- etc.

So that’s thrown things out of balance. it’s not eugenics to say that smart people shouldn’t hold their birth rate so close to zero.

"Stupid people breed too much" is a proposition that is either true or false, within some worldview.

(For example, how stupid is stupid? How much breeding is to much? Is there even such a thing as too much breeding? All these are variables up for debate.)

But preventing the spread of an idea that you fear may be true, simply because you don't like the consequences, is intellectually dishonest.

Would you endorse suppressing the idea that the earth orbits the sun just because you lived in a milieu where the primacy of the church was more important than truth?

Argue against eugenics because it's unethical to prevent people from reproducing (and therefore no amount of "stupid people" reproducing is "too much"). Don't cloud your judgment by denying propositions that you fear may be true.

Depends on the timescale you care about. It is, objectively, a very big problem over larger timescales (assuming we aren't killed off and don't engineer our children's genes).

Really the issue is about cultivating a culture of caring and willingness to learn. That generally threatens the powerful so it is always an uphill battle to protect said values.

> Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists

And all men are Socrates...?

Casually tossing about an accusation like that is not at all in keeping with the guidelines for this website.

That movie can be understood in several different ways.

Also, I'd like to point out that the core problems with eugenics isn't an assertion that intelligence is hereditary, but that:

- Race is not a scientifically grounded concept

- Complex traits do not have Mendelian inheritance

- Measurement of intelligence is problematic

- Even measures that strongly correlate with success are confounded by environmental, cultural and economic factors

Thus, the conclusions drawn by eugenicists are based on their racism and prejudice, not by any scientific conclusions. It is a pseudo-scientific framework to justify (at the limit) ethnic cleansing.

The opening of the movie could also be read as a commentary or satire about a certain type of reality TV show or talk show that was popular at that time, but it was also a really cheap shot at a specific class of people and demonstrated a level of contempt that cannot really be defended.

But the rest of the movie was focused more on anti-intellectual and shallow culture and corporate greed - the heritability of intelligence never got another mention.

Singapore seems to have done quite well operating on that notion