No problem I'll explain it to you. High IQ is useful for climbing out of poverty, this is a robust finding of social science. Poor children are on average dimmer than rich children. In the First world this is probably mostly due to genetics. IQ is mostly heritable. This doesn't necessarily the causes are genetic differences. But since we also know that above some very low plateau (nearer to mild abuse than mild neglect) education, better nutrition and nearly anything else tried doesn't show any sustained gains in IQ it is the explanation that best fits the evidence.

I think these are great examples of where "wisdom" and "preference" smear across each other's boundaries. The truths you cite above are matters of degree, we probably both agree on that. Where we don't agree probably is that the low hanging fruit of more better people and fewer expensive criminals and morons are the fairly large minority of poor children who are brought down by lousy home environments. You assert that here this is probably mostly due to genetics, implying we've got the environment "good enough" for either everybody or mostly everybody. I constantly hear of studies like Preschool Education and Its Lasting Effects showing significant and persistent gains from early intervention with the right population. In the United States, that self-proclaimed paradigm of the first world.

Now as far as I am concerned, the more interesting point is NOT whether the US being a benign enough environment so that poor people with good IQ genes have already climbed out of poverty, or whether there is still plenty of raw human material unexploited. The more interesting point is that we have different preferences in those regards, and we can't easily separate our judgements on the preponderance of the evidence from our preferences. And in a democracy, I don't have to convince you necessarily that I am closer to right than you are, I just have to convince some complex mix of people and interests corresponding to what, with other factors, will tend to get me 51% of the vote. My aesthetic preference would be to actually convince you, that would be winning and make me more confident that I was right and not just deluded by my preferences. But by deciding the democracy is beautiful, by having a meta-esthetic, I can enjoy the process whether I am winning or not.

By the way, as far as the conclusion that above a certain fairly low threshold, grooming children for success is wasted, it seems rather telling to me that 1) you never see a rational rich person sending their children to inner city public schools and making them pay for their own community college and 2) you see an overrepresentation of the well off children who were groomed by their parents in the professions and what you might call the rank and file of elite jobs. Its funny that as many rich people who may believe the children will be fine, they hardly ever apply that reasoning to their own children. If there were some reason to believe that they might be biased against reaching their conclusion that they should pay more taxes to educate poor children, then one might question their objectivity in reaching this "children are robust" conclusion.

But of course, what is this? Just me diving deeper into the wisdom I see that supports the preference I have. If you are half the nerd I think you are, you will have clever and nearly compelling counterarguments to everything I have said.