Even if we refuse to prevent poverty or provide superb early education, we might consider one other means of addressing the average person’s plight. Some of the money pouring into educational reform might be diverted to creating more top-notch vocational-education programs (today called career and technical education, or CTE). Right now only one in 20 U.S. public high schools is a full-time CTE school. And these schools are increasingly oversubscribed. Consider Chicago’s Prosser Career Academy, which has an acclaimed CTE program. Although 2,000 students apply to the school annually, the CTE program has room for fewer than 350. The applicant pool is winnowed down through a lottery, but academic test scores play a role, too. Worse, many CTE schools are increasingly emphasizing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, at risk of undercutting their ability to aid students who struggle academically—rather than those who want to burnish their already excellent college and career prospects. It would be far better to maintain a focus on food management, office administration, health technology, and, sure, the classic trades—all updated to incorporate computerized tools.

We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity. The government could, for example, provide incentives to companies that resist automation, thereby preserving jobs for the less brainy. It could also discourage hiring practices that arbitrarily and counterproductively weed out the less-well-IQ’ed. This might even redound to employers’ benefit: Whatever advantages high intelligence confers on employees, it doesn’t necessarily make for more effective, better employees. Among other things, the less brainy are, according to studies and some business experts, less likely to be oblivious of their own biases and flaws, to mistakenly assume that recent trends will continue into the future, to be anxiety-ridden, and to be arrogant.