🧠🌐 The Brilliance Dividend
Why America needs more high IQ workers —even if they come from abroad
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:
In Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance trilogy, American society is upended by the arrival of “brilliants” — the one percent born with cognitive gifts that amount to supercharged pattern recognition. These brainy X-Men analogues read micro-expressions like polygraphs, move through crowds as if solving physics equations in real time, and divine financial market signals from what seems to others like random statistical noise.
Alas, a spectacular terrorist attack, pinned on the gifted, becomes the pretext for surveillance and persecution. Many brilliants flee to a vast stretch of Wyoming bought by a tech titan with a $300 billion fortune (an amount that must have seemed fanciful when Sakey wrote the books a decade ago). The New Canaan Holdfast becomes a country-within-a-country: an electrified, solar-fed archipelago of futuristic cities named for Newton, Tesla and Leibniz.1 It’s part high-IQ refuge, part techno-accelerator — an experiment in agglomeration that would thrill urban economists.
(Also: If you think the NCH sounds a bit like Israel, you wouldn’t be the first.
High IQ equals high economic growth
If only America itself functioned more as a continent-spanning Holdfast. Frontier-pushing economies like ours depend disproportionately on their most able citizens.
