My understanding is education and poverty are the biggest factors in IQ type scores. That is to say, they drive cognitive abilities in practice. Those two factors are tightly correlated with ethnicities and cultures, of course, so it gets very messy.
Anyway, my opinions are these:
* school k-12 should be free and available to all, with well taught and well compensated teachers, in facilities that are well maintained (posh facilities are pointless, but lead-free water is a must).
* Post-secondary education should span blue-collar and white-collar work and be free to all.
* Unions should be promoted and/or required for midsize and large employers.
* Strict regulations with relation to racist hiring and behaviors in the educational and job force.
The above will work to give everyone a reasonably equal starting point; if we can achieve that as a society as a stable fixedpoint, we've done well. I doubt I or my children will see that day.
I don't claim to speak for the Left, but I am a reasonable facsimile of a middle of the road Democrat in the US. I think that I rather like Churchill's definition of Liberalism from a century ago(slightly eliding the speech[1]):
* Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty.
* Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right.
* Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference.
* Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass.
It's also the case that popular analysis of population differences has historically been channeled into racial theories, which tends to get very ugly in practice. So as a non-utopian policy matter in 2017, it's best to downplay this research, because it attracts Nazis like viscera attracts flies.
Anyway, my opinions are these:
* school k-12 should be free and available to all, with well taught and well compensated teachers, in facilities that are well maintained (posh facilities are pointless, but lead-free water is a must).
* Post-secondary education should span blue-collar and white-collar work and be free to all.
* Unions should be promoted and/or required for midsize and large employers.
* Strict regulations with relation to racist hiring and behaviors in the educational and job force.
The above will work to give everyone a reasonably equal starting point; if we can achieve that as a society as a stable fixedpoint, we've done well. I doubt I or my children will see that day.
I don't claim to speak for the Left, but I am a reasonable facsimile of a middle of the road Democrat in the US. I think that I rather like Churchill's definition of Liberalism from a century ago(slightly eliding the speech[1]):
* Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty.
* Liberalism would preserve private interests in the only way in which they can be safely and justly preserved, namely, by reconciling them with public right.
* Liberalism would rescue enterprise from the trammels of privilege and preference.
* Liberalism seeks, and shall seek more in the future, to build up a minimum standard for the mass.
It's also the case that popular analysis of population differences has historically been channeled into racial theories, which tends to get very ugly in practice. So as a non-utopian policy matter in 2017, it's best to downplay this research, because it attracts Nazis like viscera attracts flies.
[1] http://www.encyclopedia.com/politics/legal-and-political-mag...