Reasons For Breakdown IV

"The Snows of Ganymede."

See discussion of a similar future society in another sf novel here.

"...the geniuses had to be paid, or not enough of them would have accepted the positions which still had to be filled by humans." (p. 177)

I think that it is a bit more complicated than that. Geniuses would want to engage in meaningful activity and, for some of them, such activity would be socially useful or necessary work of various kinds. It is true that, in a market economy, highly skilled labor should be more highly paid than unskilled but it is certainly not the case that everyone would down tools if they ceased to be paid proportionately more. In Poul Anderson's Brain Wave, when everyone's intelligence increases, many walk out of jobs that they now find tedious whereas others recognize their responsibility to keep society running while they also set about reorganizing it.

In society as described in "The Snows of Ganymede," those living comfortably on citizen's allowance hate and envy those who are paid more for working. Why? What do the geniuses do with their higher incomes? Buy more commodities? There is a limit to how much an individual can consume. Invest in the labor of other members of the genius class? If the latter, then what do they do with their dividends? This returns us to the question of what is the basic driver of the global economy. Technology seems to have taken that economy beyond any need for a continued social divide between haves and have-nots. Instead of a bigger or a smaller slice of the cake, everyone can jointly own the bakery. (Alternatively, if my slice is as big as I want, with some to put in the cupboard for later, then I am not going to check whether my neighbor's slice is even bigger.)