If I buy some sneakers, they'll be sewn by a low-paid worker in a poor country, shipped by low-paid sailors, trucked to warehouses by low-paid drivers, picked and packed by low-paid workers, and driven to my door by low-paid drivers.
It ain't Facebook programmers on six-figure salaries who are feeding the rest of the population.
> If I buy some sneakers, they'll be sewn by a low-paid worker in a poor country, shipped by low-paid sailors, trucked to warehouses by low-paid drivers, picked and packed by low-paid workers, and driven to my door by low-paid drivers.
We consider this normal, because it has been happening for quite a while and painted in a negative fashion lately (Trumpism/Nationalism) but the reality, if you had an island somewhere, and you where establishing a country, you can't ask all these people to do that without some power-transfer that you hold over these countries/populations.
This is also true in the military, where a tiny fraction are trigger pullers. It is worth picturing what an army with no logistics personnel would look like.
What makes you think the square root of the company neatly aligns with high-IQ people? There are plenty of smart people who use their intelligence to find ways to avoid work, or to get others to do work for them, or to just amass power/influence in an organization by increasing head counts and making busy work, etc etc. Why assume that “smart” equals “having the company’s best interests in mind”?
Sure, if you could organize them and direct them without too much overhead. And if they are perfectly compliant and don't want to do something else.
Profitability is a mediocre proxy for the usefulness of work, and so we have only a mediocre ability to allocate labor usefully in our profit driven economy. Some of the best investments of money and labor in terms of profitability are even things I would call counterproductive.
Propaganda equating these two groups is a very popular thing for the rich to do with their money. Some would say that's unproductive, others would say it's smart (as long as they're the only smart person doing it, once a bunch of the smart people start playing unproductive games to work the system things get worse for everyone).
And… is it possible? In this world, less than 5% are producing the actual products and the rest are working around and producing, basically, paperwork, which may be extremely important (such as Accounting, HR, compliance) but only to other people. Which, in turns, raises requirements in more accounting and HR and OSHA and…
Paretto’s corollary law was that 50% of the work was performed by the square root of the company. Could we just harness the power of the IQ120+ people and feed all the rest of the population?