American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth

Re: Medicaid, it's difficult to find high-quality health care in the US as a Medicaid patient, mostly because practices are free to turn you away simply because you're a Medicaid patient. "We don't take Medicaid". That's it. One of the major academic health systems here (in Oregon) systematically directed all Medicaid and Medicare patients to a single low-resource clinic across town by policy, citing inadequate reimbursement rates. The result is long wait times and inadequate care.

[1] Glenngard, A., Hjalte, F., Svennson, M., Anell, A., & Bankauskaite, V. (2005). Health Systems in Transition: Sweden. WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2005

There is a difference between benefiting materially or politically from how society is structured and social respect. There is a difference between paying someone more or less for doing a job and how you treat someone when you interact to them.

Let me put it a different way... why should you respect raw intelligence over a person's height? After all, both simply an accident of birth (genetics and early nutrition). Neither are something one achieves.

I do not respect raw intelligence. I respect personality traits such as hard work, honesty, reliability, affability and bravery. I respect achievement, not potential. To tie someone's worth to inherent traits such as intelligence is, to me, somewhat shallow.

I appreciate your post and don't want to sound negative or combative, but I do think your argument's presupposition that intelligence always prevails is an interesting topic of discussion. I question the veracity of that assumption, but I don't know if other people commonly do because it appears to be widely held by individuals. In your argument you set forth that the assumptions has been true "since the beginning," because in my observation, it does not always prevail as true. The other interesting thing about it is that it is difficult to understand what exactly such a statement: intelligence always prevails, means, because intelligence is a difficult thing to measure. Is the idiotic sales guy who is really good at schmoozing successful because he is either less, or more intelligent? Perhaps he has better social intelligence. Or, perhaps it's something else: One theory might be that intellectual intelligence acts as a barrier to effective salesmanship. It's not a stretch to imagine that intellectual curiosity or other personal considerations (ethical or emotional) could get in the way of an effective sales guy's social instincts and intuition.

And what can we say about this presupposition in the long run: 'it has always been the case, since the beginning,' as you said, but what does it mean? Since the beginning of society? So does that take us back up our evolutionary tree: many of the species we evolved from surely had complex societies, as well, and can we say that the more intelligent always survived? It does not appear this is necessarily always the case. Evolution does not appear to be exactly an optimization process that takes a linear path. It is a process of natural selection of random gene mutations. So while our particular species of ape had a particular mutation that endowed us with brainpower at the cost of bite force (http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/full/news040322-9.htm...), other species survived with mutations that provided different advantages that did not have the same benefit to intelligence: evolution apparently does not predicate the intelligent and clever will always survive. It may even be true that everything is even evolving to be more intelligent or clever.

Looking at society, I find too much evidence against the idea that the intelligent and clever are always benefiting, as you say. There are just too many examples: Tesla, Grothendieck, Turing, Gaudi, James Watson, Bobby Fischer are some of the most incredibly intelligent and clever individuals of the last century, but all had misfortune due to issues of fitting in with society. How many other bright people do you know that had issues fitting in with society, that never made it to the fame of those individuals? I imagine many, many more bright and clever never reached the point of earning credence as such from society -- it seems if it there are so many of our greatest minds having suffered misfortune post earning social credence, many, many more suffered it prior, and had limited success.

It seems that in our extremely complex and politicized society that the idea that the more intelligent and clever always benefit seems even more of a stretch. Even academia, which an institution created as a meritocracy for intelligence, famously struggles to maintain such status (given, it's much closer to true in the hard sciences).

I appreciate the spirit your post which promotes competition.

This study also shows that (as postulated by folks down thread) that money doesn't change health behaviors.

That's the point - health disparities are mostly not caused by either health care or wealth. They are caused by something else (e.g.diet, exercise, genetics).