American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth

What is in question is the 'increasingly'; the only evidence offered, aside from anecdote, is that the returns from education have increased. This is inadequate. The research literature I'm aware of (http://www.gwern.net/Embryo%20selection#iqincome-bibliograph...) shows that intelligence has consistently been correlated with SES/income/occupation and it's not that clear it has been increasing at all. Particularly relevant is Strenze 2007, "Intelligence and socioeconomic success: A meta-analytic review of longitudinal research" http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-... who says:

> Several studies have investigated changes in the association between intelligence and success during past decades. Although Herrnstein and Murray concluded that “ the main point seems beyond dispute ” (1994: 52) and some studies have found support for this point ( Murnane, Willett, & Levy, 1995 ), there are still serious reasons to doubt that the importance of intelligence is or has been growing. Neither the meta-analysis by Bowles et al. (2001) nor the review by Jencks et al. (1979) found any clear trend in the correlations between intelligence and success. The same conclusion was reached by Flynn (2004) and Hauser and Huang (1997) . Breen and Goldthorpe (2001) found that the association between intelligence and occupational status in England is, if anything, declining

Strenze's own meta-analytic results using ~44 studies are on pg13 Table 2, where the correlation of intelligence with education/occupation/income over the 20th century show no clear pattern of increase or decrease:

> The influence of the third moderator variable, year of success (i.e., year of the measurement of success), is analyzed in the third section of Table 2 . Year of success ranges from 1929 to 2003 in the present meta-analysis. Judging by the sample size weighted corrected correlations ( p ), there appears to be no historical trend for any one of the moderator variables: correlations with education and occupation remain more or less stable throughout the period under study; correlations with income fluctuate more but without any obvious direction. Quite surprisingly, if unweighted and uncorrected correlations ( r ) are observed instead, then the correlations with education and occupation exhibit a declining trend.

So, if American society 'increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth' and 'as recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory', why are the more intelligent, if anything, less likely to be successful when we go from 1920 to 2000?

Some social scientists observed that women tend to choose lower-risk decisions compared to men that are pressured to take higher risks with immense payouts (rare) or complete disasters (frequent). So these two strategies yield different results - women have a smaller variance, i.e. there are less women at the top and less at the bottom of the society. For men, there are many more men at the top but almost the whole bottom tier consists of men.

There is also the theoretical notion of hypergamy, i.e. women never marrying anyone below them on social ladder and shooting for the top 10-20% of men, so the higher status they achieve, the lower dating pool is available to them. Complementarily, the higher status a man achieves, the bigger his dating pool becomes due to aforementioned hypergamy effect. Frankly, I am not sure how true this is but perhaps can be used as a heuristics while looking at current state of gender relations.

So the question is how to motivate women to take immense risks in order to achieve what traditionally men do and how to persuade them to date down. Any ideas?